Re: Bug#457353: gdome2-xslt: should not be a Debian-native package
On Sun, Dec 23, 2007 at 07:17:16PM +0000, Neil Williams wrote:
> Luk Claes wrote:
> > Neil Williams wrote:
> >> i.e. native should be a last resort - used only when it is all but
> >> impossible for the package to be used outside Debian or some distro
> >> fundamentally based on Debian like Ubuntu.
> >>
> > I thought this consensus was already a fact and that some maintainers
> > just disagree and nobody forced them to change yet...
> >
> > The reasons why it shouldn't be a native package IMHO:
> > * it's not specific to Debian
> > * it wastes bandwidth as every upload contains all the sources
> > * it's confusing for newcomers
> > * it's error prone for NMUs and security updates
>
> I'd just add:
> * it isn't in the spirit of free software to make it hard for others to
> use the code - making a package Debian-native when it could work on any
> GNU/Linux or POSIX platform makes it unnecessarily hard for a Fedora or
> Gentoo user etc. to package the code and maintain it in their own
> distro.
Sorry, but that's totally wrong. Nobody every told anyone to use the
debian/ directory for anything.
> How are they to know whether the latest native version is Debian
> specific or contains useful "upstream" improvements?
By reading debian/changelog -- that's what it's for!
> There is plenty of free hosting that could be used for this code - SF is
> probably the most common, berlios another.
gdome2-xslt isn't the only package that's debian-native while not being
debian-specific. Offlineimap comes to mind; I did also consider making
nbd a native package once, since releasing nbd twice (once upstream and
once in Debian, five seconds later) is silly. I didn't do so, because
it's already on SF where people will expect it anyway, so that wouldn't
reduce the work; but if I could get away with no longer releasing on SF,
I would most likely turn it into a native package.
There's no reason why we should force maintainers to do more work to
upload their software twice, just because some people think doing a
native package for non-debian-specific code is ugly. It isn't.
--
<Lo-lan-do> Home is where you have to wash the dishes.
-- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22
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