Re: RFS: pdfmerge
On Wed, Mar 03, 2004 at 01:23:39PM +0800, Didier Casse wrote:
> On 02/03/04, at 15:31 +0100, Thomas Viehmann <tv@beamnet.de> wrote:
> > There's no reason to produce packages for a one liner.
> > As for your "another way of doing things": Just because there's not one
> > exclusive right way doesn't mean that there's not a lot of wrong ways.
>
> Alright. If I follow your way of thinking correctly, then Debian should
> start removing lots of packages.
>
> I'll just pick one: igal! I have nothing against this package but I'm
> trying to follow your lines of reasoning.
>
> Take a look at igal: It's possible to make an image gallery program
> in one liner. :-p I don't have to show it to you coz I'm pretty sure you
> know how to do it.
Go for it. I don't know Perl all that well, I'd love to know how you can
produce something equivalent to igal in one line (short of invoking igal, of
course <g>).
> Well you can possibly argue that it's inefficient. You can list so many
> packages in Debian that we can find a one-liner turnaround. I believe you
> can list many, so why don't you start taking them off.
Find 'em, give us one line equivalents, and I, personally, will be happy to
encourage the maintainers to merge their scripts into appropriate packages.
> > No. Those people would prefer to have pdfmerge without apt-get install.
>
> I wouldn't bet on it if I were you. This script is in the ATrpms
> repository <http://atrpms.physik.fu-berlin.de/> and many people from
> RH/Fedora world are already doing an
>
> apt-get install pdfmerge
>
> for your information.
And may the world tremble at your accomplishment.
> > I will do things in overly complicated ways most of the time. But that's
> > why there's a peer review list here to sort things out.
>
> So far you're the only one objecting to including it in Debian. Our aim is
Make that at least two. And I haven't exactly seen a huge clamour of people
rushing to your defence in any coherent fashion.
> to make it available to lots of people. If it weren't that useful I would
> keep it in my drawer.
It's not a bad concept, but there's is really no point in making it a
separate package. The overhead in your package is pretty huge - according
to wc -c, there is a total of 257735 characters in the tarball on your
website, but there is only 4109 bytes of script+documentation. Even the
binary package is pretty overloaded - script + documentation is 3571 bytes
compared to 1445 bytes of overhead. Add onto that the stuff that would need
to be added to the Packages and Sources files for a bunch of architectures,
and there's more crud than utility.
> If many people do not want it in Debian, I'll back off. I'll keep it on
Eh? Where has someone said "we do not want pdfmerge in Debian"? There have
been queries about your implementation, and about your intentions to produce
a separate package for it, and a (quite valid) suggestion to submit it to GS
upstream.
> SF.net (as deb) and in RedHat/Fedora repositories (rpms).
You are free to take your bat and ball wherever it suits you.
- Matt
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