Re: Maintainers, porters, and burden of porting

[Philipp Kern <trash@philkern.de>]

On 2011-08-31, Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 10:34 AM, Lars Wirzenius wrote:
>> But both are wrong, too: it's always the job of both. It's not supposed
>> to be a struggle between maintainers and porters, but everyone in
>> Debian against bugs and shortcomings of our system. Also, neither group
>> is homogenous, and it's silly to require everyone to be an expert on
>> debugging tricky portability problems. So the best approach is, I think,
>> to do your best and ask for help when needed. And avoid framing discussions
>> in ways that create unnecessary antagonism between groups of people.
> Here here!
>
> Do your best and when the free software community (upstream, Debian
> porters/maintainers and other distro maintainers/porters) is unable to
> solve portability issues you can always give up via an "RM: foo on
> $arch" bug.

Sure.  But you can't do that with core packages.  Depending on where in the
stack you try to remove it from, you have a fallout that's huge.

(Imagine ruby being removed from sparc.  You'd need to adjust quite a bunch of
package to not build with ruby on sparc only.  "dak rm -nR -b -p -a sparc
ruby1.8 libruby1.8 ruby1.8-dev libtcltk-ruby1.8" gives a hint.)

Kind regards
Philipp Kern