Woody source frustration!
Greetings,
[Please cc me on any replies, I subscribed over two hours ago but have
yet to receive a confirmation email.]
About a month ago, I started trying to build GNOME 1.2 from Debian
sources on PPC. The process has been nothing but frustration
throughout. In particular, this is because of a couple of IMHO unsound
packaging practices which seem common to these packages, including:
* Almost never including Build-Depends in the control file. I had to
bugreport to get this added to libole2, gnome-print, gtkhtml, oaf,
bonobo, gnumeric and gnucash, now I'm working on gconf, libvfs and
gal, NONE of which has such a file. It really doesn't take so long
for the maintainer who knows the package well to scan configure.in
and do this, for others like me it takes longer and then often
doesn't work even when I think I have the dependencies. This is
essential if autobuilders are going to do anything with your
packages.
* Not closing bugs when they're fixed (e.g. when my suggested
build-depends are added). I had to close 75628 (oaf) myself, and
75635 (gnome-print), 75636 (gnumeric) and 75637 (libole2) remain
open.
* Uploading packages with unmet build dependencies. gtkhtml depends
on libcapplet >= 1.3.0, which doesn't exist.
* Building packages for i386 (and perhaps alpha) then uploading new
dependencies which break new attempts to build. gtkhtml 0.6.1
building is broken by bonobo 0.26 or later, so there is no gtkhtml
for any arch outside of i386 and alpha, and there will be none
until a new gtkhtml is uploaded.
* Inconsistent uploading frequency. Things like bonobo and gnome-vfs
are updated within a couple of days of new upstream releases,
gtkhtml hasn't been updated since 0.7's October 19th release- over
a month ago.
* Circular source dependencies!! Can you believe: gnome-core depends
on gtkhtml, gtkhtml depends on control-center, control-center
depends on gnome-core!
<flame>
As you can tell, a lot of these frustrations are centered around
gtkhtml. But some of them are just plain bad packaging practice. I
know woody is unstable, and don't expect it to run perfectly, but is
basic consideration of non-i386 builders too much to ask? Are some
people perhaps maintaining more packages than their free time will allow
them to do well?
</flame>
Apologies for the strong language,
-Adam P.
Welcome to the best software in the world today cafe!
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