Re: Bug#672773: [wnpp] removal of emile has been requested!

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>]

[sorry 'bout the late reply, had some catching up to do]

On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 02:36:14AM +0000, John Klos wrote:
> >>Sorry, but we don't care. m68k has now missed 3 Debian releases
> >>running. That's over 6 years! We should not continue pandering to the
> >>insane idea that m68k is ever going to release with Debian again. This
> >>package has been RC-buggy since approximately forever and should just
> >>be dropped from the archive. Providing convenience for the
> >>vanishingly-small number of remaining m68k users is not a good enough
> >>excuse.
> 
> There has always been and always will be people who are hostile
> towards non-mainstream. Luckily for Debian, Steve is in the
> minority. All of the other GNU/Linux distros have become commercial
> entities which attempt to distringuish themselves from each other
> gratuitously, but hopefully that will never happen to Debian.
> 
> Other people in Debian recognize that supporting multiple
> architectures is desirable and improves the overall quality of the
> project.

True, but his arguments weren't false. If we want to get m68k back into
the archive, we should get it into a working state first. In six years,
that hasn't happened yet (though we've been close for about a year now;
we miss some buildd machines, but I'm trying to get that done during
debcamp/debconf)

The fact that m68k hasn't been part of Debian for such a long time has
also meant that updating emile has basically been impossible. As such, I
couldn't fix any bugs in it anymore.

It was also the case that emile has had some RC bugs open for a while.
That alone is reason enough to kick it out.

The fact that it's been kicked out of Debian proper also doesn't need to
mean it can't get into debian-ports...

-- 
The volume of a pizza of thickness a and radius z can be described by
the following formula:

pi zz a