On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 11:41:43PM +0100, Alexander Wirt wrote:
> > We have a tradition in Debian on standardizing on interfaces, which is
> > good. But also standardizing on tools has value, because it reduces the
> > cost of diversity throughout the archive. If standardizing on tools is
> > considered to be too much, we should at least encourage uniformity.
> > That, I believe, is what Gergely is doing, and I applaud the effort.
>
> The question is: who decides? I have a bunch of packages and an established
> workflow that served me well over the last years. I don't want to learn
> another *censored* system, just because someone said its the new standard or
> it is better. I can't remember that somebody asked about deprecating well
> established and working tools.
Right, this is part of the issue. In fact, this is why in my reasoning
I've favored "encouraging uniformity" over "tool standardization". What
usually happen in these cases is that the ratio of people using the de
facto standard tool will increase while the ratio of people using
something else will decrease.
You are quite opinionated on dpatch and I'm sure you're not the only
one. But there are also many people who essentially don't care and who
will be happy to follow the tool they believe "is winning", for
uniformity sake. This, imho, is what explains the growing trend of dpkg
3.0 quilt over other patch systems that can be seen at
<http://upsilon.cc/~zack/stuff/dpkg-v3/>.
In many cases, widespread habits throughout the archive are enough to
convince everybody. But you're right that we don't have anyone who can
force *you* to change; after all you can just ignore the lintian error
or even override it. Eventually, the change will just happen. Or not.
And that is part of the reason why tool transitions in Debian might take
several years to complete.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
Maître de conférences ...... http://upsilon.cc/zack ...... . . o
Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o
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