Re: Dock Apps packaging, round 2
On Friday 23 August 2002 11:03 am, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> After the little discussion 2 weeks ago about the packaging of dock
> apps, I come with a proposal.
>
> Granularity is good. Until now, all dock apps have been packaged
> separately to achieve best granularity. However, this is growing to an
> impressive number of packages, which both bloats the archive and lacks
> of convenience for users. Furthermore, toy/funny dockapps are often not
> packaged, as they are often very simple and qualified as "useless crap"
> on this list.
> To solve this, an approach similar to that of the gnome-applets package
> is proposed, except that, due to the number of dockapps that can be
> included, there would be several packages. To put in these bundles, I
> have selected a number of dockapps, with these conditions :
> 1) Being "popular" : I considered dock apps that are already in the
> archive, dock apps that were the most downloaded on
> http://dockapps.org/, and also dockapps that I would like to package ;)
> Of course, the selection is very subjective, and this is the right place
> to flame me if you think some choices are inappropriate, or if you would
> like to see other dockapps in these bundles.
> 2) Having no dependencies, other than xlibs and libdockapp. Note that,
> as many dockapps not using libdockapp share a file named wmgeneral.c, I
> will try to make a library with it (I say "try", because many dockapps
> use different versions of this file, with sometimes some incompatible
> changes).
Modifying upstream sources is quite wrong. Now if you would like to tie this
in with #3 and become the upstream for many of these and clean them all up,
great.
> 3) Not being actively maintained upstream. This is the case of most of
> dockapps, as they represent a small amount of code and are based on
> stable APIs.
>
Asking maintainers to give up their packages so you can bundle them just seems
wrong. Why not just make your bundles be meta packages? I would much rather
see a package maintained by someone who actually uses it and is thus capable
of dealing with bug reports. That's what Debian has always been about -- the
developers using what they package.
I used to maintain wmixer and recently gave it over to another devel who is
actively working on it. Asking him to give up his work just because you want
to make neat, pretty packages is plain silly.
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