Re: Linux Core Consortium

[Bruce Perens <bruce@perens.com>]

Manoj Srivastava wrote:

Hmm. I am not sure how to take this: either you are spoiling
 for a fight, or you do not take your duties as a developer very
 seriously.
  

I was taking the implications of your statements farther than you intended, in order to get you to give them additional thought. This is a common rhetorical device. You should consider that I might be using it before you get to "he's crazy or irresponsible" :-)

	When I package software from upstream, I have skimmed the
 sources, ensured that the resulting .deb meets Debian policy, which
 may require major changes to upstream's layout, and I listen to my
 users, adding features, removing lacunae, and generally being more
 than a mechanical packager of software.
  

And hopefully this is an act of collaboration with the upstream developer.

I looked for core ABI packages that you maintain. The closest I found was libselinux1. You had a half-megabyte (uncompressed) patch for that, which it turns out is because your arch repositories and other arch-related cybercrud are in there. Probably this is common in debian diffs. When I filtered that out, I got this:

Only in libselinux-1.18.Manoj: debian <--- lots of files under here.
diff -r libselinux-1.18/man/man3/security_setenforce.3 libselinux-1.18.Manoj/man/man3/security_setenforce.3
1c1
< .so security_getenforce.3
---
> .so man3/security_getenforce.3.gz
diff -r libselinux-1.18/src/dso.h libselinux-1.18.Manoj/src/dso.h
10c10
< # ifdef __alpha__
---
> # if defined(__alpha__) || defined(__mips__)

Congratulations, you got all Debian-specific stuff under debian/ except for one little issue about compressing man pages that perhaps should be hacked into groff. You have a lot of makefile-related stuff under debian. I would have to assume that is almost all implementing Debian policy and fitting into the autobuild mechanism for all Debian architectures.

It seems to me to be the sort of thing we'd be able to come to agreement about across LCC. IMO Debian is ahead of the others as far as policy is concerned, and acceptance of much of the Debian policy manual into LCC would be the first order of business for me.

	I am not just swilling pap sight unseen into Debian's
 repository, and my work is what makes it different from outsourcing
 the package upstream.
  

Here you are making an assumption that I feel is not warranted. You assume that the other distributions concerned with this matter will wish to run rough-shod over Debian's policies and your own quality process, without giving you a say. We have no reason to believe that yet.

    Thanks

    Bruce

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