Re: from / to /usr/: a summary
Fernando Lemos <fernandotcl@gmail.com> writes:
> Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de> wrote:
>> ACK. Sometimes upstreams doing really stange things (maybe because they
>> dont have any package management in mind), that should be fixed. If
>> upstream doesnt do those fixes, distros have to catch in.
Sometimes, I think Red Hat makes some of these design decisions because
RPM's handling of configuration files sucks. If it had always behaved
like dpkg, I wonder if they wouldn't use designs that honor configuration
files somewhat more.
> Are you guys applying for maintainership for this huge delta you want to
> introduce between upstream and us? Are you becoming new, reputable
> upstreams for that forked software? If not, please refrain from telling
> people what to do.
This, however, is a really good point, and is the thing that keeps running
through the back of my head reading this thread. There seems to be a lot
of sentiment that people wish udev (in particular) would work differently
and better integrate with a split / and /usr with only / being mounted
during boot.
But it's worth keeping in mind 2.1.1 of the constitution: you can't make
people in the project do work they don't want to do. Clearly, Marco is
not interested in maintaining this sort of substantial fork of upstream
udev. In fact, one of his primary points in this discussion is that this
is a ton of work for (at least in his opinion, and I think he has a
credible prima facie case, if not a universally persuasive one) somewhat
marginal benefit and it's not work he's interested in doing. People can't
just tell him "no, you have to go do that work"; if it's so important to
Debian to go a different direction than udev's upstream, that means Debian
will need to fork it, which probably means *someone in this thread* is
going to have to fork it. So who's volunteering to be the new udev
upstream? (And, really, don't we have enough work to do that isn't
getting done because we don't have enough people?)
Note that Steve's point, namely that he (if I'm reading him right) thinks
that the upstream changes are being overstated and that upstream's
direction isn't actually going to cause problems for us, is an entirely
separate one and not something I'm addressing in the above. And is
certainly something to explore before we start arguing over who's going to
fork something that may not be an issue at all.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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