On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 11:14:29PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote: > You are member of the technical comittee, which means that I should trust > your experience. I want you and this list to understand that I take your > advice to orphan my packages very seriously. Well, that's unfortunate, because Manoj isn't speaking for the Technical Committee. As a fellow member of the TC, I think Manoj was being inappropriately inflammatory and insulting with these comments, and I think by the time he was done purging the rolls of everyone he thought we "shouldn't support" as a maintainer, there'd be nothing of Debian left. That said: > For the programs I am interested in, I do not share Debian's goal to make > them run on all existing platforms we support. > Trust me, it is not only to save my time, but also because I do not want my > packages to be a burden to the communauty. It is my experience that for > bioinformatics packages, when a bug is found by the buildd network on an > unsupported architecture, neither upstream nor the porters show much > interest for it. I do not mean this as a criticism, since I share this > point of view that there is better to do than fixing those bugs. I certainly don't agree with your position here. We have decided as a project to support Debian as a general-purpose operating system on an amazing breadth of different architectures, because we *don't know* what new and amazing purpose users will put their hardware (or our software) to, and we want to be in a position to support them whatever the case. If some manufacturer did announce tomorrow the availability of a new high-end cluster solution based on ARM or MIPS processors, would we be poised to take advantage of it? Are your packages usable by sites that have made significant investments previously in architectures that are no longer competitive in the marketplace for new hardware, but that nevertheless meet the processor demands of their specific computing application? Packages with porting bugs are not a "burden on the community", precisely because of our collective committment to *fix* these bugs. As long as you're not working /against/ users who want to see your packages supported on their arch, there's no reason to worry overly much if your package has not yet been ported to that architecture. It's a bug, but not a critical one, and being bug-free is an unrealistic standard. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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