Re: What can Debian do to provide complex applications to its users?
On Fri, 16 Feb 2018, Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) wrote:
> > - 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.
Instead of requiring the source to be provided in the source package as a
non-minified file, we could require the packager to document in
debian/README.source where the upstream sources actually are.
When I was maintaining wordpress, I introduced the idea of providing
debian/missing-sources/ to comply with the Debian policy. I would just dump
there the upstream tarball of the bundled libraries to be sure that we
have the source for the correct version. The Debian/ftpmaster rules are
respected but it's not really better than the above because you still
don't have a simple way to rebuild a modified version of the javascript
library shipped in the package.
So instead of ugly work-arounds, it might be better to just acknowledge
that we can't have the same level of support for all applications.
> > - 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?
Those applications could rely on the package manager of their ecosystem to
setup the dependencies as they need them without polluting the host
system.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Support Debian LTS: https://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html
Learn to master Debian: https://debian-handbook.info/get/
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