Re: RFC: Better portability for package maintainers
On Fri, 2006-05-19 at 14:44 -0700, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 01:15:44PM -0700, Alex Ross wrote:
> > Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > >On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 10:34:35AM -0700, Alex Ross wrote:
> > >>The following is based on premises that portability is good and that
> > >>POSIX is a standard. A proposal.
> > >
> > >I didn't see a concrete proposal in your email, only information about
> > >where to find gnusolaris build logs. Can you elaborate?
> > >
> >
> > Minimally, package maintainers and developers could take a look on our logs
> > and see if there's anything wrong. If there is, in many cases the fix is
> > obvious.
>
> Because Debian and Ubuntu developers may not have access to a similar build
> environment, it will be difficult for them to help you in this way. Even if
> the first error is fixed, they will need to wait for you to build the
> package again to see if it builds. I expect that most maintainers won't be
> interested in working this way. It makes more sense for the Nexenta
> community to fix these problems and make the patches available to other
> distributions and upstream.
I disagree. Good maintainers do care about GNU & FSF principles. And I
think those principles are close to Debian nature. Free software is
designed to be platform independent and packaging should not limit
existing capabilities. And thanks to upstream folks, 90% of OSS software
is platform independent and just works. And if Debian's meta-information
introduces problem for package which compiles and runs just fine from
out of upstream tarball on non-glibc ports than maintainer might be
interested to fix it, otherwise "Architecture: any" doesn't make much
sense in its debian/control file.
> If your intention is to invite the Debian and
> Ubuntu developer communities to participate in this way, perhaps a good step
> would be to offer them access to a porting machine where they can help you
> with this work if they are interested?
This is make sense. We will work on it and will try to provide an access
for interested developers.
--
Erast
Reply to: