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Re: Breaking programs because a not yet implemented solution exists in theory (Was: Bug#658139: evince: missing mime entry)



On Thu, Feb 02, 2012 at 06:08:33PM +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le jeudi 02 février 2012 à 16:12 +0000, Ian Jackson a écrit : 
> > The correct approach it is not to unilaterally decide to do switch to
> > some other half-implemented system, remove support for the previously
> > working machinery, and demand that bug submitters write the
> > compatibility code.
> 
> The correct approach is to notice you have a perfectly working,
> fully-implemented system, that works fine across the whole distribution
> except for a handful of packages, and to remove the compatibility code
> for the legacy system.

The mime-support solution is part of Policy.  It is a perfectly working,
fully-implemented solution.  If you feel that it is obsolescent or
obsolete and should be replaced by a different solution, then it's your
job to convince other people of that, do the work to make that happen,
and request that Policy be amended accordingly.  I have yet to see a bug
filed on the debian-policy package requesting that.

As it is, evince does not display PDFs from mutt.  Thus your solution is
inadequate, because mutt does not use your solution (and there is no bug
filed against mutt to do so).  You have thus broken an otherwise
perfectly working solution because you don't like it.

As a package maintainer, you're going to have to support some things you
don't like.  If you hate natural alignment and think sparc is awful, you
still have to support it or find a co-maintainer who will.  However
awful you think mime-support is, it's still part of Policy, and agreeing
on one system improves the experience for users, which is one of the
main purposes of a Linux distribution.

-- 
brian m. carlson / brian with sandals: Houston, Texas, US
+1 832 623 2791 | http://www.crustytoothpaste.net/~bmc | My opinion only
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