The Python mess in Debian (was: Re: On cadence and collaboration)
To come back to Debian....
Luk Claes wrote:
> Hmm, AFAICT python2.6 did not really happen in Debian yet because
> Mathias is trying to not continue with the existing hacks that have
> major issues when upgrading and wants to have a clean solution.
The only hack is the broken piece of python-central and Matthias not being able
to accept that somebody else is able to provide a well working solution without
a ton of hacks which makes it a pain in the ass to migrate away from it. We now
have a *lot* of packages with extra maintainer scripts which take care of
cleaning up behind python-central. That's not the way ho things should work.
> AFAICS
> that was already communicated in February [0] and was only really acted
> on around DebConf [1].
Wrong. Several people tried to contact Matthias on various ways and never got a
reply. He also completely failed to communicate with those people who maintain
most Python related packages on Debian, except during Debconf. This is *NOT* the
way how Python should be maintained. Actually several people already thought
abut hijacking Python due to the complete lack of communication with the Python
Maintainer, who prefers to force his changes on people instead of finding an
acceptable resolution. While I think that large parts of this are the result of
him being overworked due to Ubuntu stuff, this is not the way how things should
go. During Debconf [1] came up, but I can't see it happen soon as there are
*way* too many problems with the proposal, and it would bring us back to
pre-Etch areas..
There were rumours that Python 2.6 was not uploaded to unstable due to bugs or
missing things in python-support, but as usual there was no bug filed, and
nobody talked to the python-support maintainer.
> You can blame everyone involved, but I think it
> might be better to cooperate on fixing it instead.
Don't even think about blaming me for not trying to cooperate on Python related
things if you have no damn clue.
> [0] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/02/msg00431.html
> [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-python/2009/08/msg00003.html
Cheers,
Bernd
--
Bernd Zeimetz Debian GNU/Linux Developer
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