On Sat, May 04, 2002 at 07:25:48PM +1000, Brian May wrote: > On Sat, 2002-05-04 at 17:10, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > > Huh? How would creating another package help? Maybe I'm > > misunderstanding something. > > Create a package, say libeditline-convert that contains the symlink and > conflicts with libreadline-dev. > > That way you can install both libeditline-dev and libreadline-dev at the > same time if you want, but packages can still build-depend > libeditline-convert. > > Sure, it is a hack, thats why I asked here first ;-) It's a damn ugly hack and I doubt it will work perfectly. We should have a much better solution for this problem. > > The Debian maintainer cannot simultaneously meet *all* goals in cases > > like this. The question is, which is the best one to let slide. It > > seems to me that having the maintainer make a trivial one-line change > > to the source is much better than any of the other alternatives. > > Unfortunately it isn't always as simple as making a one line change. You > have to understand the way the configure script works, how it calls > these macros, try to get autoconf generate a new configure script (it > doesn't always work on upstream code). Isn't it just replacing "readline" with "editline"? If it isn't, your ugly hack probably won't work either. > This is fine. As a maintainer of a complicated package, I am prepared to > do this. Any maintainer should be prepared to fix his package, else he should orphan it. > This big problem is when the new version of the upstream package is > released, and certain changes mean that the old patch will no longer > apply without redoing it all over again... > > (just very small upstream changes can mess things up too). > > Of course, in a perfect world, the Debian maintainer would just send the > patch upstream, and it would get integrated before the next release, but > in practice things aren't always this easy. It's a licence violation, you could even force them to change it, but I don't think that will be necessary. We should fix all the packages instead of trying to provide ugly workarounds. Jeroen Dekkers -- Jabber supporter - http://www.jabber.org Jabber ID: jdekkers@jabber.org Debian GNU supporter - http://www.debian.org http://www.gnu.org IRC: jeroen@openprojects
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