(Note: I am not a porter, so please correct anything wrong I say below) On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 08:29:53AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote: > How about the porters responsability towards the project ? For instance, hppa > is blocking the testing migration of a couple of my packages, and probably the > packages of many other maintainers as well. Why would it be my duty to help > people running Debian on machines that are not used in my profession, and for > which I have no qualification at all? Because of DFSG point 4: "Our priorities are our users and free software". Believe it or not, I've never _imagined_ that some software which are in Debian are actually used on non-x86ish hardware. However, people want to do weird things on weird non-x86ish machines, and they like Debian because they Debian enables them to natively use the very same tools used by ordinary PC users on, say, their embedded machines for low power solutions for various automated tasks. They love it. > I do not want to prevent people having fun with Debian on this arch, > so wouldn't the best solution to never build my package on their > arch in the first place? It would reduce the number of issues to > solve in both groups, Debian Med and the hppa porters, which like > every other group in Debian severely lack manpower. Your complaint makes sense. But such policies are in place because Debian wants to allow for all its users to have all goodness, irrespective of computer type. While it may seem that your packages are (unfairly) being blocked from migration due to one particular architecture's lag, removing a package from that architecture would be looked upon as a regression uniformly, irrespective of whether such packages are used on that architecture or not. You never now on which day someone would decide to try something fancy with your package on a fancy architecture; we don't want to disappoint him/her by saying "Hey, sorry, it was too painful for us to keep providing the package on your architecture, so we just removed it"; (thereby, in my opinion, not fulfilling DFSG 4). Of course, if the architecture fails the release qualification, then it's a different matter. Kumar -- Why are there always boycotts? Shouldn't there be girlcotts too? -- argon on #Linux
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