Re: RFC: Better portability for package maintainers
On Sun, May 21, 2006 at 10:29:17AM -0700, Erast Benson wrote:
> "..there's limited manpower in the world..." can not be an acceptable
> argument for future development.
Why not? It's certainly better than “with an unspecified amount of work done
by an unspecified labor force, option A can be as good as option B, so we'll
choose that”. Heck, with an unspecified amount of work, glibc on OpenSolaris
can be compatible with all the Solaris applications you like... but nobody is
really going to do all that work. Likewise, I do not really think a horde of
developers are going to begin working on OpenSolaris' libc to make it closer
to glibc.
It boils down to what you see as most important -- you seem to put a lot of
weight into running major non-free applications on OpenSolaris, and I'm not
sure if the average DD is willing to accept that as a basic goal.
> I do not insist, instead I propose to consider. See the diff?
There might be an issue of communication here, but given that you claim that
“Debian must adjust to the new fact of life” (which at least I interpret as
“Debian must adjust its views to support a port to OpenSolaris kernel and
libc”), it sure looks like you're insisting -- it's all about words like
“must”. If you allow me to make a counter-claim using the same words, it
would probably be “Nexenta must adjust to the fact that Debian on OpenSolaris
is a relatively obscure port, which probably will not get all that much
influence in a short timeframe, and thus cannot expect package maintainers to
put in a considerable effort to adjust their packages”.
You might disagree with my goals as a package maintainer, but you should
realize that you'll either have to make porting very easy and accessible (and
using glibc makes this quite a lot easier), or do 95% of it yourself (and
hopefully submit patches upstream and to the BTS).
/* Steinar */
--
Homepage: http://www.sesse.net/
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