Re: new scripts and patches for devscripts

[Carsten Hey <carsten@debian.org>]

* Stefano Zacchiroli [2011-03-10 18:48 +0100]:
> The argument of maintenance burden is in general a valid one, but IME
> maintenance burden in devscripts is more limited by the amount of
> people who are interested in maintaining a specific (dev)script than
> by the needed language knowledge. ...
>
> To conclude with an obvious argument, rewriting useful tools which are
> known to work and which are currently maintained by a derived distro,
> when they are already written in a popular language, doesn't seem to
> be the smartest thing to do to me.

I agree with above arguments, but my conclusion is a different one than
what you seem to imply in yours.

James Vega seems to be the most active devscripts maintainer these days,
and he does this (as far as I know) in his spare time.  If he does not
want to have python scripts in it, I see no justification to force him
to do so.  I also see no reason to try hard to convince him after he
clearly stated his point of view.

One way to have both, all members of the devscripts team keep their
current vim in maintaining it, and not wasting the potential developer
resources of these two DDs, could be the following:

  Package: devscripts
  Maintainer: Devscripts Devel Team
  Recommends: devscripts-python

  Package: devscripts-python
  Maintainer: Devscripts Python Devel Team
  Recommends: devscripts

If including other languages in the new package would be planned, naming
it devscripts-extra or similar instead could be helpful.  An alternative
to the above is to rename devscripts to devscripts-base or -core, name
the new binary package devscripts and let it depend on devscripts-base.

If the devscripts maintainers would change their mind in future, these
packages could be merged.


Regards
Carsten