Re: Dangerous precedent being set - possible serious violation of the GPL

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Mon, Dec 06, 1999 at 02:37:35AM +0100, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

> 2. Debian's packages quality is very inequal. We cant force Debian to
> make Quality Standards, and if maintainer of some package dont think
> this is a bug, we can do nothing.

you've got to be joking!

one of the best things about debian is the consistently high quality
of packages, which is a result of our having technical standards and
policies (and a bunch of people with a very high CQ - clue quotient).

sure, there are occasional problems...but bug reports get filed and they
get fixed pretty quickly. if you can't deal with occasional packaging
problems then stick to the 'stable' release, don't use the 'unstable'
development version.

you want to see what inconsistent quality really looks like? take a
look at RedHat's contrib packages. some are high quality, as good as
official redhat packages or even debian packages. some are of average
quality. most are dangerous garbage. no standards, no policies, no
overall design. in short, no *system* - just a huge pile of randomly
assembled ill-fitting cruft.

craig

ps: this is not to say that we're perfect and couldn't do better. we're
not and we can.  even so, we're still pretty good.

--
craig sanders