Re: Security upgrade for potato by new major version and distro change?
* Matt Zimmerman
| On Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 10:13:33PM +0100, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
|
| > * Matt Zimmerman
| >
| > | Not necessarily. The core of the code is written in C, and the maintainer
| > | should be able to read and write C comfortably in order to effectively maintain
| > | the package. The interfaces for other languages are generally small bits of
| > | glue that don't have very many bugs and don't change very often.
| >
| > 35960 lines of code for the jdbc interface is not what I call 'small
| > bits of glue'. 2000 lines of perl glue (about 650 lines perl, the
| > rest C) isn't necessarily little either - depending on the perl
| > style.
|
| If the Java portion of the code really is that extensive, then I would say yes,
| the maintainer should be familiar with Java programming. AFAIK, there is no
| standard way to call C code from Java (and indeed this would violate the Java
| platform model), so I can imagine that the code is nontrivial.
Since this is a database engine, the java calls are jdbc, which works
over TCP/IP, so that is not a problem. And you have JNI where you can
call standard code.
| I'll say that the maintainer should be at least as knowledgeable as
| the average user about his/her package. A good maintainer will know
| his/her packages very well indeed. I see this as one of Debian's
| strengths: since packages are maintained by volunteers who take an
| active interest in them, they tend to be well cared for.
Yep. I am not saying that a maintainer should not know the language -
I am just saying that to maintain something written in C, you don't
need to be a C guru.
| > | In the event that a problem arises with the Tcl bits, I imagine I
| > | could post a message here or elsewhere and ask for help.
| >
| > of course. As you could if the problem was not knowing enough C or some
| > other language.
|
| The difference is one of scale. If I didn't know enough about the core of a
| package that I had to post to debian-devel about most issues with the code, I
| wouldn't be maintaining the package anymore; -devel would, with me as a
| sponsor.
And you'd probably learn your C pretty fast. ;)
| > I guess that depends a lot on the package. Many packages which use autoconf
| > and automake do only need dh_make and then some minor adjustments.
|
| In order to be packaged initially, sometimes it's this easy. But to be most
| useful to Debian's users? To be best integrated with the rest of Debian? To
| be maintained in the long term?
Actually - it seems to be about that easy. I am not very into emacs
lisp programming, but packaging up the new version of JDE (by using
the old maintainer scripts and updating them) and the three support
packages it now needs didn't take me more than a couple of hours. I
believe I can maintain them quite well, even though I am not a elisp
guru.
--
Tollef Fog Heen
Unix _IS_ user friendly... It's just selective about who its friends are.
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