Re: Unmaintained Packages
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.
(not that I have looked at the dpkg source, but I have heard claims that
it isn't maintainable. I don't know what the justification is for dpkg2
either).
--
Brian May <bam@debian.org>
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