Re: When will it be ready?
On Mon, 15 Apr 2002 05:46, Eray Ozkural wrote:
> I'd like to increase the clue factor of this mailing list a bit.
>
> Disclaimer: I don't have the time to waste with flames, so buzz off if you
> intend to. I don't care about those kind of responses that I'm used to
> seeing on debian mailing lists.
The number of flames you get depends on your attitude. If you want to change
the number of flames then change the attitude.
> On Sunday 14 April 2002 18:13, John Purser wrote:
> > family, pets and ruining your health with massive doses of caffeine I
> > get less and less confident about your ability to deliver the quality
> > of software I've come to expect from Debian.
>
> Packaging KDE for a particular platform is not too difficult. It is simply
> a task that requires adherence to conventions on that platform, which is
> not drastically different in debian's case from other gnu/linux
> distributions.
Packaging KDE is significantly more difficult than most other packaging
tasks. KDE depends on many libraries which all have to work together, and
compilation takes ages.
For example when packaging devfsd there are no great dependencies, so it's
easy for me to sort out problems, and the compilation only takes about a
minute, so I won't even get myself a Coke while waiting. Building KDE
packages takes huge amounts of compilation time even with really good
hardware. By the time a compile completes you've probably watched an episode
of your favorite Sci-Fi show and had dinner in the mean time, you definately
won't be still concentrating on the last code change you made.
> As a matter of fact, packaging software is simply a configuration and build
> task. It is not a design or programming task. You simply make sure you can
> fully automate the build. That's all there is to it.
Many Debian developers do that, they are the less skilled developers.
To do a really good job of developing Debian packages (and to have a hope of
doing a half-decent job of packaging something as complex as KDE) you need to
do a lot more. You need to be able to do serious development on the source
(users will send in patches to the BTS and you're not much of a developer if
you can't test them before sending them upstream). You need to also be able
to do independant code changes, often you will be in a situation where the
upstream code base doesn't comply with Debian policy and the upstream author
doesn't care. To get the Debian package working correctly you have to be
able to write your own patches and keep them maintained across new releases
from upstream.
> Maintaining debian packages is more of a
> social skill than technical skill, that's why Overfiend sucks at it. :> You
> have to be really very patient, very understanding and tolerant.
YOU are complaining about someone else lacking social skills?
YOU are complaining about lack of understanding and tolerance?
> However, it is not in any way *more* difficult than packaging it for other
> distributions.
Packaging for Debian IS more difficult because we have higher standards!
> The job of a maintainer does not even correspond to a configuration or
> build engineer in the real world, because configuration/build engineers are
> responsible for writing the configuration/build system. Here we're just
> using it and it's supposed to be really really really very easy :) The real
It's supposed to be really easy, but often it isn't.
> with respect to build and policy conformance. Nobody expects you to fix
> hard bugs in the code either.
Sure, if you have low aims then you may not try fixing hard bugs in the code.
I've fixed code bugs in almost every package that I maintain. I consider it
to be part of the job.
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