Re: Bug#684396: ITP: openrc -- alternative boot mechanism that manages the services, startup and shutdown of a host

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 11:13:23PM +0200, Gergely Nagy a écrit :
> Michael Biebl <biebl@debian.org> writes:
> 
> > If those ports need a GR to silence any criticsm regarding those ports,
> > then something is going seriously wrong.
> 
> I've yet to see said criticism.

In the absense of regression tests, we distribute thousands of packages that
nobody knows if they work or not, because nobody ever used them.

Then one day they happen to fail to build, or regression tests are implemented
and crash, and suddenly the maintainer has to take care of development issues
that are not supported upstream nor by the porters.  Both are dedicating their
work to areas where they know that users and themselves will directly benefit
from their efforts.

Have you seen mobile phones running with Itanium processors, or was the Higgs
boson discoverd by analysing particule accelerator output with a farm of MIPS
boards ?  No.  We need to take this specialisation into account, be proud of
what our ports bring to their users, and be more open-minded about ignoring
combinations of softwares and architectures that were never designed to work
together. 

There is a simple heuristic to detect such cases, it is when the only help a
maintainer receives is guidance on how to ask for a login on the porter box and
fix the package himself.  If neither upstream, the users and the porters care,
then we need to provide to the maintainer some ways to ignore issues without
having to spend time on requesting architecture-specific archive removals, etc.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan