Re: what about a unofficial public community repo? (was: Re: qmail and related packages in NEW)
Raphael Geissert dijo [Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 10:05:23PM -0600]:
> William Pitcock wrote:
> [...]
> >
> > The ideal way to handle this would be to have a single repository. PPAs
> > solve a different problem, which is giving contributors and developers a
> > playground to publish their in-progress packages. This is more about
> > getting packages to users in an efficient way, for maintainers that do
> > not wish to include those packages in Debian proper for either policy
> > reasons, code quality reasons, or otherwise.
>
> Solution:
> http://their.domain.tld/debian sid main
The problem there is for this is that people want their work to be
known by more people. Have you seen how outdated apt-get.org is? It
was a valuable resource back then, but... Well, last time I checked,
there were still several Potato backports for software in Woody.
Oh, and right now it has become completely useless - It says it knows
about 1448 sites, but lists only one: http://ftp.debian.org/debian
> Why do people even want to care about those packages?
> I mean, why would one want to use a package which has dubious quality, dubious
> maintenance, dubious origins (can it even be legally distributed/used/etc?),
> dubious <insert whatever you want here>?.
>
> If a package is not in shape, then get it in shape.
> If they don't know how to setup a simple repository or don't know how to package
> and are not willing to learn, then they should just forget about it and install
> the software by hand (if they know how to do that, of course).
>
> There's no reason to spend/waste more time/resources on all that extra stuff
> only newcomers will, wrongly, use.
I have to agree with you on this rant, as a DD. However, there are
LOTS of software which are not up to Debian's standards in
this-or-that regard. Having an infrastructure where just about anybody
can upload packages (with just a legality check, I'd say) is positive.
Then again... We can direct them to Ubuntu ;-) They are offering the
service with their PPAs.
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Gunnar Wolf - gwolf@gwolf.org - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244
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