Re: Security upgrade for potato by new major version and distro change?

[Tollef Fog Heen <tollef@add.no>]

* Matt Zimmerman 

| On Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 12:07:02PM +0100, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
|
| > So, for instance, the maintainer of postgresql must know perl, tcl, C,
| > C++, python and java/jdbc very well? ( since it is written in C, and
| > has interfaces for all the programming languages mentioned.)
| 
| 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.

However, for python, you are right, about 300 lines of python and 2300
lines of C.

(note that all those numbers are from "wc -l"'ing the source files, so
it includes blank lines etc.

| 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.

| If I needed to do this every time a change was necessary in a C
| source file in one of my packages, my progress would be very slow
| indeed.

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.

-- 

Tollef Fog Heen
Unix _IS_ user friendly... It's just selective about who its friends are.