Re: Some thoughts about problems within Debian
On Thu, 3 Jan 2002 23:24:12 +0100 (CET)
Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de> wrote:
> One important thing are more frequent releases. We don't have to release
> as often as other distributions but IMHO it's needed to have a new stable
totally agreed, I hope debian-installer will be one of the solutions to
this... but we, the maintainers, have a great responsibility on this!
I noticed that many people ran to upload new upstream versions of their
packages when the first woody freeze announce was released, and I think
there's something wrong with this... why wait so much? if one does this
the package won't get tested for many months, etc...
> Most of us who work for Debian do this in our spare time. But I do
> personally disagree with the "you can't force a volunteer to do anything"
> argument I heard in several discussions. These were discussions about
I have one simples thought about this "you can't force a volunteer to do
anything" argument: if you don't want to do things right, give them up...
there are people willing to do it out there... you chosed to be responsible
for that package/task, nobody forced you, then do it right
> - Make debconf mandatory for all packages that interact with the user
> while installing/removing a package in woody+1.
> One positive effect would be for the user that he doesn't has to answer
> questions several times during the installation of the packages - he can
> instead go to drink a cup of tea after he answered the debconf questions
> that come en bloc. Another positive effect is that this makes life
> easier for everyone working on automatic installations of Debian.
totally agreed too, debconf is a great step on Debian's evolution...
it should be a 'must' on policy IMO... would someone with some experience
on doing ammendments care to write one?
> On the other hand he is responsible for the packages he maintains and IMHO
> this implies that we can expect from a maintainer that he tries to fix RC
> bugs in his packages at least once a month and to try to fix the other
> bugs in his packages from time to time [3]. If it's generally agreed that
and if he cannot, he should orphan the packages, of course
> perfectly). But if you look closer you'll see that it will harm Debian as
> a whole if popular packages like e.g. evolution that are currently not in
> woody won't make it into the stable release (many users will say: "What?
> Debian has so many thousand packages but this popular package that is in
> every other distribution isn't in the recently released Debian 3.0?").
yes... that 'will be removed from woody' is no good for Debian as a whole,
that's why this is not a good way to force maintainers to do things...
[]s!
--
Gustavo Noronha Silva - kov <http://www.metainfo.org/kov>
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