Re: Unmaintained Packages
Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> writes:
> On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 07:49:34PM +1000, Brian May wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 09:32:38AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > > If you can't tell, I'm allergic to this "let's rewrite it from scratch"
> > > thing that seems to be popular lately. If you have something good that
> > > has some problems, don't try to solve those problems by throwing it out
> > > and starting again! All you'll do that way is come up with a whole new
> > > set of problems. The only excuse for rewriting from scratch is when the
> > > old code is unmaintainable, and (on the basis of the small hacks I've
> > > made to dpkg in the past) I don't see any evidence that it should be
> > > unmaintainable by competent people.
> >
> > Sometimes rewriting from scratch can be a good thing.
> >
> > You can learn from design decision mistakes made in the previous version
> > instead of constantly patching over them.
> >
> > Just because dpkg is not unmaintainable in your opinion doesn't mean
> > the design can't be improved to make it more flexible, for example.
>
> In my experience, this is almost always better handled by gradual
> rewriting than by a total ground-up effort. You get validation at each
> stage; it's easier for other people to review the changes and confirm
> that functionality and correctness haven't been lost; and you can
> introduce improvements to users more quickly because they don't have to
> wait until a huge rewrite-from-scratch is stable enough to deploy. There
> are exceptions, but I believe they're very rare.
Anyway, the reason for dpkg2 would be more the changed specs than
anything else. Not sure how much code can be be reused and how much
one wants to reuse due to uglyness.
I just ment that one reason bugs in dpkg might not be closed is that
work is rather put into the new source format and changes to the
binary format which aren't transparent from the dpkg's hangelog or
bugs. Work might be done behind the scene.
MfG
Goswin
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