Package: tech-ctte Severity: normal Dearest members of the Technical Committee, I hereby submit to your attention the "coreutils ls options conflict". I believe the issue is well-known, so I describe it only briefly below; feel free to ask if you need more information. ls is missing several key options, notably -y, -e, and -j. Patches are available for some amount of time now: http://bugs.debian.org/666198 adds -y (necessary for compatability with old shar archives) http://bugs.debian.org/666244 adds -e (entangled directory display option, quite nice) http://bugs.debian.org/666684 adds -j (suitable output format for twitter, cell phones, other 21st century media) The inclusion of these features in the archive has been one of the goals of many of us, for many reasons. For many periods of time, the upload of such a version of coreutils has been held back due to NACK and inaction by the coreutils maintainer. The desire to not pointlessly bloat ls with options is good, but then this is GNU ls, and it already supports -aAbBcCdDfFgGhHiIklLmnNopqQrRsStTuUvwxXZ1 [1]. The coreutils maintainer doesn't seem to be able to complete the review in a reasonable time frame. The situation has escalated to the point that coreutils upstream, who favors adding at least the crucial -y option as a hidden option (appropriate given its compatability use case), is in disagreement with the Debian maintainer. As anti-DPL[2], I'm worried about two aspects of this issue: a) The risk of legitimating the fact that by not acting a developer can block indefinitely the work of other developers (and possibly of the entire project when working on a rather far reaching release goal). b) The risk of a negative impact on project morale if---due to the reason above rather than a legitimate technical reason---we will miss the Wheezy multi-ls-option release goal. I therefore bring before you the issue of whether: - the coreutils maintainer has the right to block indefinitely accepting these options into coreutils ls; - or rather if other interested parties have the right to override his NACK and go ahead with uploads that would allow project-wide testing of the multi-ls-option implementation. Many thanks in advance for your help, Cheers. PS I've to point out that timing on this issue is, unfortunately, critical. The Wheezy freeze is close and according to the release team we're already late wrt the ideal upload date for coreutils. The delay is not tech-ctte's fault, of course, but please understand that a long decision time on your part would be a de facto decision. I'd appreciate if you could reach a decision on this in a timely manner, as you've recently done in several other nicely expedited cases. -- -see -shy -jo [1] A side benefit of filling in the missing gaps is it will allow the getopt parameter to be autogenerated, avoiding much complication. [2] http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/my_anti-platform/
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