Re: Bug#176627: a fallacy
On Sat, Jan 18, 2003 at 03:42:16AM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> However, this, too, is quite confused: by marking a package
> arch: any you are not signing up to port the package; you are not
> consigning the upstream to support hell, and indeed, if portability
> issues are discovered, you may actually help (gasp) improve the
> software for i386.
To be quite fair to the OP here, he *has* done the work, at least the
hard part, to see that this package will run under PPC and probably
other arch's too, and whatever my initial impression of the usefulness
of this package to other ports or the tone of the initial report, with
my hat on as the maintainer of a cross platform library (both upstream
and Debian) I can say this has the potential for flow on benefits far
beyond anything offered to the package in question even. I'm quite
looking forward now to the day when Debian will enable me to create
binary packages of my software (free or otherwise) for all of its
supported arch's (and a couple it doesn't as such) from whichever of
its platforms I choose as my favored to develop on. [ To paraphrase
the litany of GNU Make: don't write portable code, use a portable
compiler ;-p ]
Sorry Adam, while I might have been just as cranky as you about the
initial simple demand (partly because I get a lot of really stupid ones
that are just as brief in other contexts), in the light of the followup
from the OP and then Colin, I have to agree with Manoj that modulo other
ports complaining about bloating their archive with irrelevant (to them)
software (which I now also doubt), only good things are likely to come
out of this.
If -policy wants to run a flame war on this topic now, knock yourselves
out, but can we please leave the bts report off the cc, and probably
also the OP (who I can't speak for) and myself (who I just have ;).
As I've said before, I'll be incorporating the findings of the OP
re portablility into the next package and uploading it arch: any.
thanks,
Ron
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