Re: Uncoordinated upload of the rustified librsvg
Hi,
2018-11-06 14:19 Jeremy Bicha:
It looks like we will want to have a librsvg-c source package to build
the older librsvg for architectures that don't support Rust yet.
While the Debian GNOME team could maintain librsvg-c's packaging
alongside librsvg, I'd be happier if someone who cares more about
ports would maintain it. Any volunteers?
tl;dr:
It might sound as if I what I'll suggest is to put back the work for you
gratuitously, but I honestly think that you (GNOME team) should keep
being the maintainers of a re-uploaded librsvg-c package, at least for
the time being.
Long:
... For the following reasons:
1) You've been maintaining it for years and have the experience (cadence
of releases/updates, upstream repos and bug trackers, etc), while
anyone else getting involved now will not have such experience,
unless they have been in contact with this library or maintenance of
GNOME packages before.
Of course, if anyone volunteers, great, either as part of GNOME team
or independently. From my side, I am already struggling with what I
have and I am planning to reduce my involvement in some areas.
1.1) I think that at least the initial job should be done by you as a
kind of "orphaning" and moving it to QA, if you really don't want
to maintain it from day one.
1.2) The librsvg-c has to be in sync with the -rust one and be uploaded
in lockstep if the package binary names change, or have to conflict
for one reason or another, so it has to either have the same
maintainer or have close coordination.
2) I hope not, but if the new Rust implementation becomes problematic
for stable-release arches, GNOME might need the C implementation in
some of them, or alternatively dropping GNOME completely on those
arches.
If those stable-release arches do not have GNOME or any librsvg
available, for sure they will drop as stable-release arches, since
the requirement of building 98% of the archive will not be met.
3) Presumably the maintenance burden will be low, if that C
implementation is dead, and will only need security fixes if Suse,
RedHat and similar distros still maintain it, which I guess they do.
And since it will not affect the most popular architectures or stable
releases, it will not require urgent action.
5) From what you said in another email of this thread, I was surprised
that you consider "ports" as a kind of "nonfree" and, in a way, not
part of Debian. For me, it's just about the same as breaking
rev-dependencies: some arches have more users that many packages
which are rev-dependencies of a given package, and breaking rev-deps
when updating packages is generally frowned-upon.
But let's leave that aside.
Nowadays most of the architectures in Ports are from hardware "on its
way out" due to being proprietary and not being produced anymore
(alpha, hppa, etc) or playing around with other kernels.
But Ports was also originally, and nowadays primarily, the way into
Debian-Stable for new architectures. Not long ago (2014-2015) three
architectures entered Debian in such a way and they are now release
architectures: arm64, ppc64le and mips64el.
Maybe they don't rank high in popcon because they don't have it
enabled, but there many people using arm64 in boards or laptops, and
there are institutions running whole clusters or supercomputers, or
workstations (but that's mostly x86_64 nowadays), doing science or
serving faculty and students. Some of them even use GNOME --
probably not the ones in supercomputers though ;-)
You'll want to have GNOME users in the next big architecture, and
that architecture will come trough debian-ports.
So independent of all else, I think that debian-ports is way more
important than non-free, on which very few people relies upon except
for firmware. But people in this thread seem to think otherwise,
so... dunno.
At a minimum, I don't have an easy way to do the initial binary build
of librsvg-c required for the NEW queue.
There are porterboxes for that, but if it helps, I can build it for you.
Cheers.
--
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo@gmail.com>
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