On Wed, Sep 04, 2013 at 01:02:35PM -0500, Peter Samuelson wrote: > [Thorsten Glaser] > > I absolutely do not want to see anything related to ruby on my > > systems. > Why? Is this just an emotional reaction, or is it the 13 MB of > dependencies, or something else? > I wonder if anyone feels the same way about, say, libraries written in > FORTRAN, or binaries linked against libX11. From experience, lots of people feel the same way about binaries linked against libX11. I think FORTRAN is probably less of an issue for people, because it's a much smaller runtime (Installed-Size: 1195). But I would also not like to see devscripts depend on ruby - not just because I don't want to have the runtime installed for a language that I don't speak[1], but because letting people write devscripts in whatever language they feel like turns that package into a maintenance nightmare down the line, by further fragmenting your pool of maintainers. Sure, accepting scripts in ruby means you will get contributions from people who write in ruby who might otherwise not have contributed, and you may have people participating in maintenance who would like to help in ruby and otherwise wouldn't help. But on the flip side, for the package to be well-maintained you now *have* to have maintainers working in each of perl, python, and ruby, and the members of the maintenance team are now that much less able to step in for one another. And on a completely unrelated note, discussions at DebConf about multiarch handling of interpreters reveals that devscripts has its own special problems just by depending on perl + python. Maybe people should see the fix required for this before deciding to make devscripts depend on more interpreters. ;) -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org [1] And whose community, for that matter, has turned me off from ever learning
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