UHU linux and forking in general [was: Re: Bug#176267: ITP: mplayer -- Mplayer is a full-featuredaudioand video player for UN*X like systems]
VEROK Istvan <vi@inf.bme.hu> wrote:
> > Somebody want to explain how there can be a "the official
> > Hungarian Linux distribution"? Did the Hungarian government
> > grant them a monopoly or something?
> Nothing of the sort. Uhu is the one and only Hungarian distribution,
> period.
Well, this is a strange statement.
Several GNU/Linux distributions (including Debian) use
internationalization. Several GNU/Linux distributions (including Debian)
have several hungarian developers. It's probably true that UHU is the
only distrib that has it's HQ in Hungary, but it's still quite ...
... interesting to call it "official" or "the one and only".
(For example, I am hungarian, and I use Debian, and I intent to keep
doing so in the future. If I look around my desktop, I see only Hungarian
text. (Apart from this message of course.))
> And the reason they renamed the .deb suffix to .uhu is that they
> modified dpkg in some places, added some entries to the control files,
> etc.
Well, I mean no offense, but IMHO its a Bad Thing (tm) to fork and screw
up the Debian package management system. I dont's think package management
has _anything_ to do with languages.
If those changes to dpkg are useful, they should have been commited to
Debian, instead of creating a new and incompatible version.
If someone wants to create a local distribution, he/she should only change
things that are specific to localization. Anything else should be commited
upstream. Better yet, one should not fork at all, but create all necessary
infrastructure upstream and distribute a subset of the original thing,
without forking it.
I think that maintaining a different codebase for generic
(non-local-specific) tools is a waste of brainpower.
Cheers
--
Csillag Kristof <csillag@member.fsf.org>
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