On Fri, Aug 25, 2000 at 02:26:27PM -0400, Peter Teichman wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 25, 2000 at 08:02:49PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > there's one thing I don't understand: Why are there two different versions
> > of the same package, one in Debian and one made by Helix? Why can't either
> > the Helix people ship the original Debian packages or become the Debian
> > maintainers of the Debian packages?
> I can't ship the original Debian packages, since they are generally
> not up to date compared with my work. They also don't include some of
> the usability patches we are making, which may or may not be accepted
> for general use in Debian.
Have you filed bugs against the appropriate packages, either saying
"new upstream version x.y is available" or "the following patch does
such-n-such, please include it"?
If the maintainers don't have time to do this right now, then it's
probably appropriate to NMU. If they don't have time to do it ever,
then it's probably appropriate to adopt the package.
> I haven't become the official maintainer of the Debian packages for
> three reasons.
> - I need to talk with some people on our side regarding
> redistribution of our trademarked images. Also, I'm not sure those
> images are free enough for Debian, though it sounds like they
> probably are given a conversation I had with Wichert at LWE.
Can you please do this then? Cc'ing debian-legal would probably be
the best way of ensuring we don't have another "this is free enough"
"no it's not" "what? it is" "it's not." "oh damn. hang on, i'll have to
talk to people again" saga...
Also, I note the copyright files of the various helixcode .deb's don't
reflect any concerns of this sort at all. At least for the first dozen
or so alphabetically that I could be bothered looking at.
> - Some maintainers don't want to give up the maintainership of their
> packages.
And if they're already doing a decent job, why should they want to? As
long as you're feeding the patches you need or want to them, and they're
actively addressing their bug reports this isn't an issue.
> - Time. The maintenance of these packages takes quite a bit of time,
> and I haven't had a chance to fix some outstanding bugs (like
> missing/broken build dependencies), much less get things in place
> for uploading to the main distribution. I'm also working on our
> build system here, which is taking much of my time.
That sounds roughly like "sorry, the Helixcode packages are buggy and
not policy conformant", which sounds like we shouldn't be recommending
them at all.
If it's mainly build-depends and such that are the problem, just copying
them straight from the existing .deb's should be fine. The existing
.debs are evidently good enough for unstable, if yours aren't any worse,
then so are they.
Removing an unnecessary fork and killing off all the pain that it's
already causing is much more important than fixing every bug right now.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``We reject: kings, presidents, and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and working code.''
-- Dave Clark
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