[cc to lwn dropped, this is also heading offtopic for -legal]
On Mon, May 29, 2000 at 10:17:19AM -0700, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> > Or unless the Harmony project [2] succeeds to a similar degree that
> > lesstif has and KDE can happily link against it. Or, unless Troll Tech
> > folds and Qt becomes BSD licensed [3]. The latter's a particularly
> > unfortunate thing to have to hope for.
> I agree, these are possibilities as well, but I don't think they will happen
> any time soon if at all.
Again, they certainly won't if no one tries.
Here's another clue: Debian won't be changing it's stance on this. KDE
won't be included in Debian until the license issue is resolved.
If you're really looking for the path of least resistance, this isn't it.
We've been told a hundred times that there's no issue, and asked to
ignore it because even if there is an issue, no one cares, and it's KDE
afterall, a hundred more. But, respectively, there is, and we're not
going to. So please, if you really want KDE to be an official part of
Debian, try one of the other "impossible" options.
> I think tar.gz, and patch files are great means of source distribution. But
> if you read further in what I said, I was referring instead to the
> debianized source tree not being standardized.
It is, otherwise the "-b" argument to "apt-get source" wouldn't have a
hope of working.
> > Distributing packages as source isn't necessarily desirable: it requires
> > a full compilation environment on all machines, it gives newbies a lot
> > of options for errors (not having a proper compilation environment,
> > having extra libraries that need to be uninstalled while the package
> > is being compiled, having bits of the package silently not be built),
> > and it introduces a whole class of bugs that are difficult to duplicate
> > by the maintainer.
> >
> > Especially for a large, complex desktop system that caters specifically
> > for newbies and the non-technically inclined, it's far from an ideal
> > solution.
> Possibly. But these are all quality assurance issues that Debian has
> historically been excellent at solving.
Ummm, no, it isn't. We only support about six people rebuilding packages
other than the respective maintainers, namely the autobuilders for the
various architectures. They file a dozen or more "This package doesn't
build out of the box" bugs basically every time they get around to it.
Yes, we avoid giving this problem to users, but the *way* we avoid that
is by focussing on being a *binary* distribution so that it doesn't
matter if Regular People aren't able to build the binaries properly.
> Thus, I think the advantages of
> source distribution (in general, not just for KDE) outweigh the
> disadvantages.
You're welcome to think that, but thinking doesn't make it so.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG encrypted mail preferred.
``We reject: kings, presidents, and voting.
We believe in: rough consensus and working code.''
-- Dave Clark
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