RE: How much redundancy?
On 20-Aug-2002 Devin Carraway wrote:
> Fairly often I've seen ITPs or package sponsorship requests followed up
> to by questions about redundancy against packages already in Debian.
> Thus, I'm curious -- what degree of redundancy is acceptable or
> desirable? As big as a Debian distribution is, there's unavoidable
> overlap. It's easy to understand, say, choosing one particular ping
> implementation from a couple of functionally near-identical
> possibilities. However, one package could functionally be entirely
> provided by another, while still desirable by way of being smaller,
> simpler, written in Python or whatever. It seems reasonable to provide
> redundant packages when users could have a credible desire to use one or
> another (e.g. one of the half-dozen minimalist windowmanagers.) Is
> there a reigning convention?
>
there is always a war between the old guard "I remember when I could name every
package in Debian off the top of my head" versus the new generation of gFoo,
kFoo, xFoo, myFoo, hisFoo.
In the end I believe that as long as a package in Debian is being used by more
than 1 person it has value. Let's fight the urge to just package something
because it is interesting. However if there is a user base out there then
Debian should support them. Our users should not have to compile software on
their own.
Reply to: