Ruby community and Debian (was: Go (golang) packaging, part 2)
On Tue, 29 Jan 2013 22:57:03 +0100, Michael Stapelberg
<stapelberg@debian.org> wrote:
>Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> writes:
>> "consistency across multiple platforms" has been claimed as a benefit
>> for allowing "gem update --system" to replace half of the ruby binary
>> package, amongst other things. It wasn't a good argument then, and it
>> isn't a good argument now.
>I am not familiar with the Ruby situation, I only know that many Ruby
>developers seem to be very angry at Debian people. Is there a summary of
>the events that I could read?
In my past experience it is the usual case where and upstream and/or
its community takes at as a personal offense when a user is not using
the latest and greatest software version[1] and does not understand
that one might be mandated to use what a third party (here: Debian)
found fit to freeze for a release a year or more ago.
This attitude can be found upon many upstreams communities (for
example, in Open/LibreOffice and KDE), but is even harder with ruby
since ruby packages seem to be so small that there are so many of
them, that they have something resembling a release process for a
rubygems bundle package, introducing the time lag caused by releases
once for them and once for us, and that our packaging of their softwae
was done in a way that ruby packages are the biggest nightmare to
backport that I have ever seen[2] (gem2deb, 'nuff said).
I do sincerely hope that most of those things will be history when
wheezy is released.
Greetings
Marc
[1] up to "what, you're only using what we released last week? Please
upgrade to our git head and check back.
[2] I think it was between woody and sarge when more and more package
began to rely on a debhelper version that wasn't backportable because
it used a perl language construct that was not available in the past's
stable perl
--
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Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header
Mannheim, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom " | http://www.zugschlus.de/
Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG "Rightful Heir" | Fon: *49 621 72739834
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