On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 07:04:40PM -0600, Steve Greenland wrote: > On 02-Feb-05, 18:31 (CST), Matthew Palmer <mpalmer@debian.org> wrote: > > > > So archive bloat is not a problem for you, and "apt-get dist-upgrade" not > > actually providing upgrades to the latest versions of everything is > > perfectly fine? > > In the case of RT, yes. I was discussing the issue in a wider sense in that paragraph, as Florian was saying that multiple versions of random applications is a good thing. > I notice that there are several different versions of gcc in the > archive, and nobody seems to be bothered by that. Likewise, there are > several versions of python. There are, of course, good reasons for both. Yeah, lots of people write bug-ridden C and C++ code, and Python upstream has never heard of backward-compatibility. Another example is PHP, which is another example of a lack of planning taken to a horrible extreme. I'm not happy about any of them. But pointing to them and saying "they can do it, why can't we" is poor form. > RT likewise. It changes a *lot* between minor releases. Add-on tools > have to be updated, local scripts checked and fixed, etc. etc. etc. Best > Practical makes new bugfix releases to older versions, so they obviously > don't expect everybody to upgrade all at once. > > RT is not an application. RT is a framework. It's quite reasonable to > have multiple versions of that framework available. So package it as the library it apparently is. The description of the request-tracker3 package makes it sound like it's a ready-to-run application. It doesn't even *mention* that it's a development platform (unless you count the word 'Extensible', which is a now a content-free weasel-word ever since XML arrived on the corporate scene). If there *is* a front-end app ready for immediate use, then make that the request-tracker package, and build the underlying libraries as a bunch of lib*-perl packages with appropriate API versioning. As an added bonus, someone else can then package their own RT-based trouble-ticketing system and use your libraries, without needing to have the whole RT frontend installed, a la the Mozilla Mess. - Matt
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