Re: libhtml-wikiconverter-markdown-perl
I'm not horribly active in the group these days, so this is a somewhat
outsider perspective, but hopefully it's all still sensible-sounding.
Jose Luis Rivas <ghostbar@debian.org> writes:
> + If you don't like people working over things you done and changing the
> things you did, then please, do not use licenses that state that
> software is freely modifiable.
> + If you want people to ask you before working on something you worked
> before, then please, do not use licenses that do not warn about that.
This really isn't a great argument. We all work on free software and use
permissive licenses, but that's separate from how we collaborate with each
other. There are *lots* of things that our licenses allow that we don't
generally want to do, particularly if we consider ourselves part of the
same team.
The objection isn't to violating a license or violating someone's
copyright, but rather to making it harder for someone who feels
responsibility for a package to work on it. Similar to if someone took
one of your favorite packages and converted it from dh to CDBS.
The general rule of thumb in team maintenance situations is that one
doesn't rewrite the entire packaging system to use some other tool unless
the team has generally agreed to standardize on the other tool across the
board or if the person who was previously maintaining it doesn't have time
to continue to maintain it.
Jonas has been very up-front and straightforward about his use of CDBS for
the packages that he maintains as part of the team. I think it's an
entirely legitimate question whether the team wants to consider those
packages to be team-maintained and deal with them like the other packages
maintained by the pkg-perl group, since they *are* very different and the
team otherwise uses dh, but Jonas has repeatedly offered to take his
packages elsewhere if people feel like they're an undue burden. I think
if we're going to say "no, we're standardizing on dh," we should give
Jonas a chance to take his packages elsewhere rather than just converting
them. And as long as we *don't* say that, and he stays involved in the
maintenance of a module, it does seem a little rude to change it from CDBS
to something else.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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