Hi. (The following is just some not-so-random bits of a Debian maintainer, interested by tracking release-critical bugs. Neither the maintainer of ardour, or a member of Debian's Security Team.) Paul Davis <paul@linuxaudiosystems.com> (13/10/2007): > i would like to make it clear that if Debian attempts to distribute a > version of Ardour that builds without internal linkage, we (the ardour > project) will be unable to provide support to any Debian user who has > problems of any kind. That's why the Debian Bug Tracking System (BTS) is for. > we have notified Gentoo of the same thing, and have so far had to tell > several Gentoo users that they must be rebuild their binary version of > ardour disabling the build flags that Gentoo's ebuild set up by > default. if this happens within Debian, we will also notify users of > the same thing. Depending on the package and on the maintainers, but usually if a package gets a lot of bugs reported, one can easily add a -dbg package so that the backtraces are meaningful. That's also the case for the depended-upon libraries. > while i understand the theoretical and practical reasons for your > objections to embedded copies, we spent 3 years dealing with endless > hassles caused by us *not* embedding copies of the C++ libraries that > we use. I guess I can understand that, but just direct the $distro users to the $distro bug tracker. > even on systems like debian, where theoretically the system copies of > C++ libraries and the compiler are always in sync, we *still* get > users who, for some reason, have reinstalled the compiler or the > libraries and as a result cause bizarre behaviour on the part of > ardour (and other C++ applications that use similar libraries). Then, either they are to blame because they are doing bad things w/o the appropriate knowledge. Or there's a bug in the packages they are using, in which case a bug of the appropriate severity should be opened on the Debian BTS. > the embedded version of libsndfile exists because we have patched > libsndfile and thus far erik (libsndfile's author) has not accepted > our patches. Then I guess the Debian maintainers of ardour might know about that and talk to the Debian maintainers of libsndfile. Being a maintainer is also about talking with other maintainers, not just pushing a new package for each upstream release — which happens, sadly. > far more people follow ardour.org for support issues than go to > debian-specific channels, and we will not be railroaded into silently > dealing with a decision (were you to make it) to force linkage to the > system version of the C++ libraries that we rely on rather than our > internal copies that are guaranteed to have been built by the same C++ > compiler with the same compile-time flags. Again, either the users are doing something bad, or there's a bug in $distro, which shall be reported. And that happens. A lot. And we — either the maintainers, or people doing QA globally — fix them. Cheers, -- Cyril Brulebois
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