Re: Clarification of Policy and Packaging manuals requested
: Zed> After having lurked in debian-devel for a while, I suspect that
: Zed> Manoj will object that developers for Debian need to be sufficiently
: Zed> proficient in writing shell scripts and whatever else that they can
: Zed> deal with this on their own.
: ;-)
: Zed> I think that mindset is not in the best interests of the Debian
: Zed> project.
: I think I disagree. Letting developers who can't write shell
: scripts can in no way be in the interests of the project, one of
: whose goals is *excellence*.
Maybe we should also try to have developers who are up to date on the
tools and who use modern software. AFAIK you are a bare essentialist and
are resisting new things that simplify packaging. Lets tolerate our
weaknesses and combine our strenghts. Zed is right and in the best
interest of excellence we need to combine our knowlege which we can f.e
through the bug tracking system. Maybe someone does not know shell scripts
too well but is an expert in other areas.
: Zed> The easier it gets to do this *in a proper fashion*, the more
: Zed> software will show up as being available under Debian, even if
: Zed> it's only in the contrib/non-free areas.
: I do not wish to promote quantity at the expense of
: quality. If it is in Debian, it is a high quality product. I never
: want that diluted.
quality comes with ease of maintenace and ease of fixing bugs not by
having arcane languages and procedures to follow in order to generate
packages. The more things have to be done manually the easier the bugs
come up. quality also comes with having many eyes that see the bugs.
Having an easy method of people coming in and being able to package
software gives us access to a large pool of contributors and people who
can check up on things.
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