Re: When will it be ready?
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I'd like to increase the clue factor of this mailing list a bit.
Disclaimer: I don't have the time to waste with flames, so buzz off if you
intend to. I don't care about those kind of responses that I'm used to seeing
on debian mailing lists.
On Sunday 14 April 2002 18:13, John Purser wrote:
> family, pets and ruining your health with massive doses of caffeine I
> get less and less confident about your ability to deliver the quality
> of software I've come to expect from Debian.
Packaging KDE for a particular platform is not too difficult. It is simply a
task that requires adherence to conventions on that platform, which is not
drastically different in debian's case from other gnu/linux distributions.
As a matter of fact, packaging software is simply a configuration and build
task. It is not a design or programming task. You simply make sure you can
fully automate the build. That's all there is to it. Usually testing takes a
lot of time, because you want to be absolutely sure you're not going to waste
people's times. That is the most difficult part of maintaining large sources
in debian in my experience (sather, sourcenav, etc...) And since you have to
rebuild from scratch and then install and manually test things, the work
takes a long time... Maintaining debian packages is more of a social skill
than technical skill, that's why Overfiend sucks at it. :> You have to be
really very patient, very understanding and tolerant.
However, it is not in any way *more* difficult than packaging it for other
distributions. So you do have the right to yell if we're not able to keep
standard software up-to-date. Debian policy is not something that puts
extreme demands on packagers, and as a matter of fact several packages from
other distributions will fit perfectly fine on a debian system...
The job of a maintainer does not even correspond to a configuration or build
engineer in the real world, because configuration/build engineers are
responsible for writing the configuration/build system. Here we're just using
it and it's supposed to be really really really very easy :) The real job
here is giving a guarantee that your package will not have any flaws with
respect to build and policy conformance. Nobody expects you to fix hard bugs
in the code either.
Since KDE3 already runs on several debian workstations you may guess that it's
fairly straightforward to configure, build and install it... which means it
is indeed not difficult to package it...
To sum up: yes, users should be picking on maintainers who are not fast
enough. And that will hopefully make them or other volunteers to take the
initiative that will ensure debian's timeliness.
Best Regards,
- --
Eray Ozkural (exa) <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr>
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo Malfunction: http://mp3.com/ariza
GPG public key fingerprint: 360C 852F 88B0 A745 F31B EA0F 7C07 AE16 874D 539C
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