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Re: the quality of Debian's diff.gz



On Sun, 01 Jun 2008 15:14:49 +0200, Ove Kaaven <ovek@arcticnet.no> said: 

> George Danchev skrev:
>> Very good, but please make these easily visible/readable to the rest
>> via diff.gz

> Oh no, not again... This was already flam^H^H^H^Hdebated on
> debian-devel. I believe debian-mentors is where new maintainers learn
> current best practices, not where *new* practices are developed; for
> that, you'd go to debian-devel. Feel free to join the efforts there.

        Point. I should say that Debian should be a good free software
 citizen, not just a glorified packager of software.  I like the clause
 in the GPL that says that the sources should be distributed in the form
 best suited for modification (usually defined as the form used by the
 authors). It does not really matter if the authors use haskel or
 smalltalk or Ocaml, despite the fact that not many people know these
 languages. 

        Given that, if the package is developed using, say, git, then we
 should distribute it using the native development mechanisms -- in
 order to let the downstream users fully cooperate in development. Since
 we do not deprecate people developing in python or C or c++ or perl,
 despite each  language having limited users, instead of PHP, which I am
 told is the most popular, we should not dictate what work-flow people
 use.

        We also should not try to hide these preferred forms of
 modifications from our users. And in this day and age of Web 2.0,
 requiring an intrnet connection is not an anathema; and neither is
 shipping the sources in 3.0 (git) format, though I do believe people
 disagree. 

        manoj
-- 
Clear the laundromat!!  This whirl-o-matic just had a nuclear meltdown!!
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>  
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B  924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C


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