Re: What can Debian do to provide complex applications to its users?
Hi Raphael
On 16/02/2018 17:11, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> Dolibarr is not alone:
>
> - while gitlab is packaged in Debian, its packaging took years and the
> result is brittle because it can break in many ways whenever one the
> dozens of dependencies gets updated to some new upstream version
> (BTW salsa.debian.org does not use the official package)
>
> - I have the Debian packaging of distro-tracker (the code behind
> tracker.debian.org) available in the git repository for years
> but I never released it into Debian because it embeds a few javascript
> libraries (bootstrap, jquery) and I don't want to validate that
> it does work with the versions currently in Debian
>
> I'm sure we are missing lots of good applications due to our requirements.
> What can we do to avoid this?
How can we avoid upstream not making source available for their
binaries? Because this is fundamentally the issue with shipping only
minified javascript without any sources or reference of where it comes
from. This also isn't a problem in Debian, it's a broken JavaScript
ecosystem that's driven by very poor software developers who tend to
want to smack together anything that will work for a little while so
that they can get paid for their work and move on to the next bad project.
> I don't have any definite answers although there are ideas to explore:
>
> - we could relax our requirements and have a way to document the
> limitations of those packages (wrt our usual policies)
Which requirements are you referring to? If it's relaxing the need for
source for minified javascript, then no thanks.
> - we could ship those applications not as .deb but as container
> and let them have their own lifecycle
What would this solve and how will it solve it?
> What do you think? Do you have other ideas? Are there other persons
> who are annoyed by the current situation?
As someone who intends to package software that contains some embedded
low-quality JavaScript code, yes, certainly frustrated. But with the
JavaScript community and their underdeveloped ideas of how software
works, not with Debian.
-Jonathan
--
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) <jcc>
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian Developer - https://wiki.debian.org/highvoltage
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ https://debian.org | https://jonathancarter.org
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