Re: Gnome to be removed from debian?
Havoc Pennington <hp@Mcs.Net> wrote:
> Attempts are being made to solve things; but if Debian is unhappy, either
> move the stuff to experimental, or help us with release management, or
> post productive solutions, or file bug reports, or whatever. Heck, Lars
> Wirzenius's "Debian Lessons" were very helpful; I forwarded that to the
> gnome hackers list.
I have been using the CVS sources because of the dependency mess
that has been created. I have to agree with Havoc that its
not the upstream developers' fault that less than stellar
planning went into Gnome packaging up 'till now.
For now, I can think of two helpful things that could be done.
First, clean up the Gnome packages we have by putting them in
Experimental or even make a Gnome directory. Then maybe
untangle some of the spaghetti of dependencies where possible
by removing some of the redundant versions. The separation
of the packages and marking them as unstable is the important
part.
Second, I would really like to see properly functioning debian
directories in each of the CVS module directories. If the
Debian maintainers would send their debian directory as a patch
to the upstream maintainer of that module, then it would
accomplish making it easier for Debian users to test, without the
burden of providing a .deb for the weekly snaps. It might
provide a sense of good will between the Gnome and Debian
developers as a whole (that doesn't seem to be there judging
from some of the responses). And it will help in packaging
them when the stable release rolls around. The Debian directory
already exists an a good portion of the modules anyway, why
not go all the way with it?
The only question I have about it (since I don't maintain a package
myself yet) is how can we make it easy to locate Gnome
packages in a place like /opt/gnome while they are still
unstable? If I run ./configure --prefix=/opt/gnome
before running debian/rules, will the debian build process use
it, or overwrite it?
Wade
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