Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> writes: ... > Put otherwise, going to one distribution and saying "you guys are doing > it all wrong, look at how $OTHER distribution is doing it, you should do > it their way!!1!" isn't very convincing. It's particularly unconvincing if one has witnessed the Gentoo BoF at this year's FOSDEM[1], in which they discussed the deep joy of having users who patch packages into a state of uselessness, and then report bugs against the result without mentioning that they broke the package themselves. We have a packaging system that rewards people that read up on the tools we provide for doing the simple tasks one might expect to be able to do with it. Conversely, it punishes those that don't. If those that expect to be able to do this sort of thing without consulting any documentation are encouraged to go elsewhere by this fact, then I'd say that's a feature, not a bug. Cheers, Phil. [1] I filmed that session: http://mirror.be.gbxs.net/video.fosdem.org//2013/crossdistro/Gentoo_BoF.webm The relevant bit starts at 11:10, with a very salient quote almost immediately from Petteri Räty (betelgeuse): "I think user patching should be a _bit_ hard ... it's a support nightmare. Unless well thought out, all the bugs coming in to gentoo.org, debugging becomes ... complicated" -- |)| Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560] http://www.hands.com/ |-| HANDS.COM Ltd. http://www.uk.debian.org/ |(| 10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London E18 1NE ENGLAND
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