Re: Derivatives, MongoDB and freezes
Hi Daniel and others.
On Apr 20 2013, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> I came across this on Planet Debian
>
> http://rb.doesntexist.org/blog//posts/lack_of_cooperation_from_ubuntu/
>
> I'm guessing that Ubuntu may not have pushed the changes to sid because
> of the freeze, that may well be the answer to Rogério's questions.
First of all, thank you (Daniel) very much for CCing me on this post.
Second, thank you for bringing this to a more technical audience.
*** From now on, occurrences of 'YOU' do not necessarily apply to Daniel. ***
Third, I will elaborate this in a longer fashion as another post in my blog.
In fact, it will be a lot longer, but I just want to address some points
here in a more specific form, quoting the e-mails directly.
Fourth, I would like to apologize for not getting in contact with the Ubuntu
maintainers of the MongoDB package before posting to my blog.
Fifth, I would *not* like to apologize for the people that have *not* pushed
their work even *before* wheezy was in a freeze. In fact, for *more* than 1
year. That's the time for Ubuntu's 12.04 LTS, 12.10, and 13.04 releases.
You had a *lot* of time to get things pushed to Debian (or, even better,
directly with upstream). So much for "cadence, cadence, cadence".
Sixth, I may not be a Debian Developer (who cares, there's a lot of work
being done for Debian coming from people that are *not* Debian Developers),
but I know a good deal about Debian, *and* I care about the distribution
that I use.
Please, correct me if I am wrong, but, apparently, this is a strong signal
that I do care *more* about Debian than some people that don't distribute
their work to their base distribution.
Seventh, despite not being a Debian Developer, I am a Debian Maintainer, and
I know very well that even if I am not listed in the Uploaders field of a
package or have unlimited uploading rights, I *can* (and, morally, *should*,
as should you who already had a fix!) work towards making the software that
we rely on being better.
Please, don't tell me that "This entire discussion was started by someone,
who is not the maintainer or uploader of a package, complaining on Planet
Debian that Ubuntu had changes that Debian didn't.".
Again, please educate me if I am wrong, but the "knowing what your role
is" is, BTW, one of the rationales (if not *the* rationale) behind the NMU
thing that governs the weekly Release Critical bugfixes that people like
Gregor Herrmann (thanks, gregoa and others!) try to maintain.
If I am wrong here, please, do wake me up from my misguided dream and tell
me that Debian is not about technical excellence---I should, then,
reconsider where I spend my time. More than anything, I think that
willing to maintain the packages is of high importance and (thanks,
Eight, having a blob of 522KB of patches (when you could integrate things
earlier) is a lot. Especially when it has really trivial things that could
have been pushed way back then (Remember? at least two of your releases went
by!).
Ninth, I don't really have to tell others about my work, but in the case of
those asking "who are you", then you can know about me if you try to see
some of my work in packages that others have considered a "hard nut to
crack", like the HandBrake video transcoder (among others).
Tenth, the technical person in me is puzzled to know how some magical things
are working in a not-so-intended way and, in the course of the investigation
discover more than 4 embedded libraries in a package (which are, now,
already killed in the Debian archives for unstable, but which are not in
wheezy).
At the risk of omitting some names, I would like to thank (even if you
didn't realize that you were agreeing with me in thread---but you were)
Jonathan Dowland, Charles Plessy, Wouter Verhelst, Gergely Nagy, Guillem
Jover, Daniel Pocock, Thomas Goirand, Russ Allbery.
OK, I can certainly go on and on. Again, I apologize for some of my behavior
(the form of it, namely, a blog post in general), but not for all of it (the
content).
Regards,
Rogério.
P.S.: I'm not subscribed to debian-devel at the moment and would appreciate
being CC'ed.
--
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 4096R/BCFCAAAA
http://rb.doesntexist.org/blog : Projects : https://github.com/rbrito/
DebianQA: http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=rbrito%40ime.usp.br
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