Re: Dangerous precedent being set - possible serious violation of the GPL
On Thu, Dec 09, 1999 at 09:22:28PM +1100, Craig Sanders wrote:
> 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!
I was very serious.
> 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.
I talked about situation when they dont get fixed pretty quickly.
It is not so bad if maintainer is lazy. Someone can do NMU.
But the worst is if maintainer has different opinion than report
submiter. Submiter is sure that it is a easy-fixable bug, and
maintainer is sure this is not his job to make packages that works w/o
editing configs or making a few other quite-easy changes on as
many systems as possible.
Its not bad with Debian we have now, but itd be exetremaly bad
with newbie-friendly system.
> 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.
A lot of maintainers thinks that Debian's Q-standard is
`We should be better than RedHat'
We should make real Q-standard that says about standards
of high-quality package (how it should be, not have to.
This requirements should be pretty high).
> 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.
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