Re: Corrections about distrowatch/debian
On Tue, Oct 15, 2002 at 09:27:59PM +0800, Cindy Hsieh wrote:
> It has been a policy of DistroWatch to list only default packages in
> the tables. The "About" page has some more information on the
> subject.
Thanks for the clarification.
I read ``as was kindly pointed out to me by Bernhard Rosenkraenzer from
Red Hat:"I believe the right think to do is to list the default
version instead of the most current one (at least in the Qt case,
we're shipping 38 packages that depend on Qt 2.3.x and no packages
whatsoever that actually use Qt 3.0 - it's included primarily as a
convenience for KDE developers." The trouble is that it is not always
easy to figure out which is the "default" version by simply looking at
the package list. Nevertheless, I will try to include default packages
wherever I can.''
This may be an acceptable solution for RedHat, which has a different
policy than the one we have at Debian, as well as different
constaints. It is quite common in Debian to have alternative packages
for different versions - some maintainers even provide alternative
packages for CVS versions of some actively-developped pieces of
software (Mozilla comes to mind).
This means it is often difficult to even _define_ what "default
version" would mean. If you decide to stick with the current
behaviour, it would be much more useful to put a small note
summarizing the issue on each distro's page, or users could just
believe wrong things. Something like ``Please note that the versions
listed here are those understood as "default versions" for the
package, and that newer versions may be available in packages with
other names''
Regards,
--
Yann Dirson <Yann.Dirson@fr.alcove.com> http://www.alcove.com/
Technical support manager Responsable de l'assistance technique
Senior Free-Software Consultant Consultant senior en Logiciels Libres
Debian developer (dirson@debian.org) Développeur Debian
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