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Re: Perl4caml packaged



On Fri, Feb 27, 2004 at 01:26:06AM +0100, sylvain.le-gall@polytechnique.org wrote:
> Well, i think you know my point of view... I think it is better to have
> a main repository for all debian ocaml packages :
> - if a problem arise in one package, that you need help from another DD,
>   it is the best way to share effort ( i have some experienced syncing
>   with Mr Edward -- was really easy ).

Indeed some sort of a repository does aid that effort.  But Debian
packages are highly independant little units and don't really require a
central repository.

> - if you are away, that some of us need to do some special things... it
>   is better to have one working version ( for example i am used to
>   inject watch file in debian/... I can do it on packages that doesn't
>   belong to me, without the need to call every maintainer to say : hey
>   it would be a good idea to do this or that ).

The normal way to do this in Debian is submit a wishlist bug with a
patch.

Of course, if you're a co-maintainer of part of a "packaging team", then
this is a little different.

Personally, for my package, I welcome and encourage patches, but I want
to be the one to decide if they get applied to the sources.  That way, I
know what's going on with the code, and have a chance to spot potential
problems.

> - it permits to hijack some package ( like the thing i will do next week
>   : hijacking numerix ).

That's possible anyway.

> And optionally :
> What difficulties have you regarding svn ? ( at the beginning i think
> you were a pro pkg-ocaml-maint )

OK, this is a question I can answer, as a convert from svn.

The main problem is that it's difficult to maintain local svn trees.
Say I had my package in pkg-ocaml-maint, and was going to go offline for
the weekend, taking my laptop with me with no Internet connection.  I
could either go the weekend without checking in any changes.  Or I could
create my own Subversion repos, check in the originals, check things in,
and when I return, check in one big batch that loses all the history for
what I did over the weekend -- plus have to manually merge and sync this
all the time.

With tla, I simply branch off the main repo to my laptop repo, and when
I get back, tla star-merge back into the main repo.  Change history from
my laptop preserved.

Basically, Subversion is better if you are frequently interested in
finding out exactly what happened to a file when.  Arch his better if you
are frequently interested in merging in changes and working with others.
Both can, of course, do both tasks; these are just the areas in which
they excel.

> No, i think it is a good idea to have a list of ocaml related package...
> Just to know which ocaml related software are around....

grep-available -sPackage -FPackage ocaml

-- John



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