Re: overhaul of the debian ocaml policy

[Ralf Treinen <treinen@free.fr>]

On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 08:56:33AM +0000, Sylvain Le Gall wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On 23-08-2010, Ralf Treinen <treinen@free.fr> wrote:
> > On Sun, Aug 22, 2010 at 03:07:02PM +0000, Sylvain Le Gall wrote:
> >> On 22-08-2010, Ralf Treinen <treinen@free.fr> wrote:
> >
> > [...]
> >> > What is the reason to mandate a special field or comment in the META
> >> > field when it is created by debian? We are patching sources all the time
> >> > both for end user applications and develpment packages, without attaching
> >> > an extra warning sign. What makes META files so special that warrants
> >> > an exception to that rule?
> >> >
> >> 
> >> Whenever you patch the source, IMHO, you limit the patch to:
> >> - fix the build system to make it compile on Debian (source -> binary
> >>   package, new OCaml version)
> >> - fix security bugs
> >
> > Certainly not. We do add features (I am speaking here of debian packages
> > in general, not only of ocaml libraries), and we fix things that are
> > broken.
> >
> 
> Could you be more precise about the features we add. I don't have
> examples in mind. I don't consider that FHS compliance is a feature for
> example but I don't see any commmon case where Debian packagers add a
> new function to a library.

Looking through the hevea changelog:

  * Modify hevea and imagen such that pictures are by default generated in
    png instead of gif. Added options -gif to hevea and imagen for generation
    of gif. Modify man pages accordingly.

For that one we even had a discussion on this mailing list whether we
should stay with png even when the gif patent expired (the answer was yes)

 * removed spurious space in the definition of \cyan in html/color.hva
    (patch sent in by Salvador Abreu <spa@di.uevora.pt> - thanks!).
    Closes: Bug#136243.  

 * Added an option "-charset" to specify the charset to be printed in the
    META tag. The default is the output of "locale charmap"
    (closes: Bug#165447) .

 * Don't insert a full stop in info output after reference "Up: (dir)"
    (file: infoRef.mll, closes: Bug#179377).

 * Installed improved imagen script by Francois-Rene Rideau
    <fare@tunes.org>.

and more. We also have improvements of documentation, additions of
examples, and so on. The bug fixes and the code are communicated to
upstream, who usually will use them (but a fixed release will be 
published much later), or something doesn't agree.

-Ralf.