Hi. Didier Casse wrote: >>Which is bad, because I'm sure the package will raise the "why does >>every badly written, trivial script need to be included in Debian?" > Do you know how many people use this "trivial script"? You'll be surprise [...] OK. Let's assume that I'm convinced that a pdfmerge script was useful. > It is small things that make up big things. :-p This small script has > entered several big projects, both GPL and non-GPL. Besides like Philipp > said, it's another way of doing things. The proper place for the script (after doing things right) is ghostscript upstream. Take a look at pdf2ps and try to get your program next to that. 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. Your script is inefficient at what it does because it runs ghostscript twice as often as my program and produces huge postscript files for no good reason. Your package is inefficient in it's means because it's better done as a plain, single file shell script just as pdf2ps is. Your picking the wrong channel for distribution because the script would be much better placed in the along with the other ghostscript utility scripts. > There are no differences. You're right! But how many people knew what > you've just wrote? Of course I'm in a mentor's list and here, most people > would say "I knew it... pfff so trivial". But I can assure you that many > common/layman people do not know this and prefer to download my script and > achieve their results fast rather than reading the manpage of ghostview. I didn't use the manpage, it's all in "gs --help" output. (Well, I used -c quit, but you could take -dBATCH if you wanted to only use the man page stuff (in fact, I'd think that I read -c quit before it was replaced by -dBATCH in the help output) or something like that... One of the purposes of this list is peer review, so I wrote this message because I don't think that packaging that for Debian is the right thing to do. > Manu people would love to do an apt-get install pdfmerge and get the job > done. No. Those people would prefer to have pdfmerge without apt-get install. > Why do we want those scripts in? [...] > I guess most people would agree w/ this. Yes. But many people will, after they compared you're package to pdf2ps / ps2pdf (actually ps2pdfwr I guess) and my suggestion will notice that you're doing stuff in an overly complicated way and that if you'd done it plain and simple it would most likely be more suited in a collection of these tools than a standalone package. 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. Kind regards Thomas -- Thomas Viehmann, <http://beamnet.de/tv/>
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