Re: Debian Weekly News - June 27th, 2000

[Taketoshi Sano <kgh12351@nifty.ne.jp>]

Hi.

In article <20000630184613.D8818@silly.cloud.net.au>,
  at 30 Jun 00 08:46:13 GMT,
    on Re: Debian Weekly News - June 27th, 2000,
 hamish@debian.org (Hamish Moffatt) writes:

> On Fri, Jun 30, 2000 at 12:15:23AM -0400, Chris Armstrong wrote:
> > IIRC, the HelixCode people who are maintaining their .debs are dedicated
> > to making them Debian-compliant and as high quality as possible.
> 
> No doubt many third party deb contributors would produce quality packages.
> However there isn't as much drive for quality as there is within Debian,
> imho.

Even if the drive for quality is enough, the problem with dependencies
can occur for packages not in Debian proper repository.

Suppose a package A in Debian provides some functions, and another package
B in Debian happenly uses that functions.  It is natural for the maintainer
put the dependency "Depends: A" on his package B.

Also suppose a package A1 out of Debian provides the enough functions
to use with the package B, and A1 also has some special functions which
are essential for some limited users, but the package A can not provide
these functions immediately because of some incompatibility between A
and A1, or using totally different language for their code, etc.

In this case, when a user of package A1 wish to use package B, then he 
will have some problems.  To use package B, he must install package A, 
but it may conflicts with package A1, and he needs A1. Then he has to 
modify package B himself to use it on his system.

If package A1 is registered in Debian, then users of package A1 can request
the maintainer of package B via BTS to change the dependency in order to use
both A1 and B at the same time on their system.

In my understanding, this is the main concern behind the integration of
JP packages within our Debian-JP project.  We know it is difficult to keep
the quality of packages outside of Debian even when we wish to do so and
when we try to do our best.

(JP packages had been released for Debian 2.0/2.1 as the out-sided add-on 
packages. For potato, we have worked for the integration hardly, and we 
think there are no need for another release of add-on packages.  There are 
still packages in JP only, mainly due to the limited resource for us.  
About ten members in JP project have been waiting their new maintainer 
process over months.  Well, Debian-Chinese project seems to have much less
official maintainers than our Debian-JP project, so I think they also know 
this difficulties.  Maybe Debian-KR project too.)

-- 
  Taketoshi Sano: <sano@debian.org>,<sano@debian.or.jp>,<kgh12351@nifty.ne.jp>