Re: overhaul of the debian ocaml policy
On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 09:35:42AM +0000, Sylvain Le Gall wrote:
> 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:
[...]
> Are you not afraid of portability problem with other distro not shipping
> these changes?
Not at all.
Of course one should try to coordinate with upstream, and also take their
advice into consideration. However, sometimes one just prefers a different
solution. Besides the case in hevea with gif/png, I remember a different
case where I had proposed a patch to upstream which was rejected since
it would have been difficult to port to windows. The result was another
fork in one single functionality (determining the locale of the user).
-Ralf.
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