Re: Bug reports, patches and other stuff
In article <[🔎] 19970909001010.60754@snowball.ucd.ie> you wrote:
: ftp://genie.ucd.ie/pub/ftp/alpha/debian, although I would like to get
: them to some more or less standard place, like Christopher's.
I strongly suggest master.debian.org...
: I think that the Debian/Alpha effort is not quite well organised at the
: moment.
True.
: The first thing I would like to see now is at least to get all
: the binary packages together.
I completely agree.
: Master is not a good place for this (see Michael Alan Dorman's explanation
: why).
I strongly disagree.
: Many people
: willing to participate in the port are not official Debian developers,
: and a strict policy can just frighten them away.
I really don't understand this sentiment. Signing up as a developer is easy.
There have been times when the person processing new maintainer requests
introduced a delay due to being too busy on other things, but I've never had
any trouble helping someone who thinks it's taking too long find the right
person to ask to get it done. What is the big problem here?
: After all, Debian developers can verify all external contributions and
: upload the packages to master.
It seems to me that this just makes more work.
: Please tell me what you think about all this.
I like your technical ideas, I appreciate your work to fix some bugs and get
an alpha-specific bug tracking mechanism together (though personally, I'd
rather motivate the maintainers of the primary Debian bug tracking system to
make whatever changes might be needed to handle architecture-specific bugs in
a better way), but I really don't understand or agree with the notion that
there are things which "aren't ready for master.debian.org yet". I think it
lamentable that the best current set of boot files aren't on master, and that
several critical packages (the compiler, binutils, etc) aren't on master in
their latest, useful form.
You say that we need a more open development model than Debian, but to take
the development away from the main distribution tree and bug system seems to
me to be further obscuring the work, in effect "hiding it" from anyone who goes
to "the usual place" to try and find bits.
The whole point of the 'unstable' tree is to provide a place for packages to
be aggregated in preparation for a release. I think that's exactly where we
are in the process. We have a few bugs in core packages that need to be fixed,
and we haven't built a lot of the "unimportant" packages yet. However, what
we have working today is a very useable core... there's no reason to hide it!
I've been tempted several times to just snag the best of everything from the
various FTP sites and put it all on master. New folks looking to try Debian
alpha are going to pull the bits from the mirrors like ftp.debian.org, and if
what they find doesn't work, they're going to go away and run something else.
We really must figure out how to always have our best-effort bits in "the
usual place" if we're going to build a critical mass and succeed.
Bdale
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