On 22 Jan 2019, at 19:35, Allison Randal <wendar@debian.org> wrote:
After some private communication with the DPL and Debian OCaml maintainers and your reply, the structure of the Debian Project has been explained to me, for which I am grateful. To recap for the Technical Committee, the state of the communicating upstreams is as follows: - the developer of white_dune has confirmed that it is ok to rename /usr/bin/dune from his package to /usr/bin/wdune. He has also requested an update of the package as the version in Debian is very outdated. [1] - the consensus on the libdune numeric library thread is that there is no current use of /usr/bin/dune, and it can coexist fine with the OCaml dune package as a result [2] - OCaml Dune is happy to make whatever documentation or packaging changes necessary to avoid any confusion to users.
Thanks also for this clarification, Allison. My concerns arose from a combination of the perceived authority with which Ian Jackson spoke, his invocation of important-looking procedural matters within Debian, and the rather absolutist and antiquated position from which he debated the point. It can be easy to forget that we as experienced OSS developers are no longer FTPing up tarballs to Sunsite and excitedly updating the Freshmeat.net entry with a new release. Our respective projects (OCaml and Debian) now represent the work of hundreds, if not thousands of developers' contributions, and the costs associated with putting those contributions at jeopardy are high. It is also why Ian's absolutist position that ascribed ill-intentions and negligence to the OCaml community is so wrong. In the "good old days", a developer could reasonably track a global namespace, but nowadays there are thousands of OCaml packages in our domain specific package manager alone. From these, we cannot predict which ones will succeed and be worthy of packaging as first-class entities in Debian. A file search in the Debian namespace is insufficient: it will not reveal potential conflicts from (e.g.) another fast growing projects in Cargo or Npm, or policy decisions taken by other distributions that cause conflicts in Fedora, Arch or OpenSUSE (for which we also maintain CI and container images) So the best we can hope for in modern OSS packaging is for the upstreams to be as cooperative as possible with each other, and for Debian to facilitate such communication. As such, this has happened very effectively here, and Debian is providing a valuable service for which we are grateful. My ire emerged solely from the fact that we appeared to being forced to have this conversation while being held hostage, which is unnecessary and risks the trust of all those developers for whom we are responsible downstream to that use OCaml and Debian together. Thanks again for all the helpful feedback, and I look forward to making future contributions to Debian now that I understand the project much better. I have a prototype executable linker/loader lying around that hides multiple binaries using cgroups/unshare so that naming conflicts can be handled cleanly. Good fodder for a future Cambridge pub conversation :-) regards, Anil |