Re: overhaul of the debian ocaml policy
On 23-08-2010, Ralf Treinen <treinen@free.fr> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 08:56:33AM +0000, Sylvain Le Gall wrote:
>> 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.
>
Are you not afraid of portability problem with other distro not shipping
these changes?
Doc and examples are ok because they don't imply incompatibilities. I am
always afraid of mixing packager/upstream task...
Regards,
Sylvain Le Gall
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