Re: Apology to the authors of helper packages
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On Mon, 16 Mar 1998, Craig Small wrote:
> Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> > This is old hat, and I think it should not be raked up again,
I think I'm the person that more or less started this, and I
actually tend to agree with Manoj here, but I'm seeing a second
flamewar develop here, and I'm hoping that I can kind of dampen
things.
> Also, saying that all Debian developers must know shell scripting
> back and front is not a good idea either. How about helping these
> people?
And here is where I'd like to start. Manoj has been gruff. He has
been cynical. He has been, arguably, downright unfriendly at his worst.
He's also been consistently helpful. Even when I was lurking and
not contributing, I remember seeing consistent snippets of code
floating by with his name in the From: header, detailing this or that.
We've been on opposite sides of an argument, but when I had a question
about how to deal with a basic technical aspect of the nightmare I was
packaging, it was Manoj who wrote me a short example script that once
I understood it got transcribed almost exactly into the postinst file.
And the next time I see that kind of problem, I'll know what code to
look at. At the risk of sounding like an armchair psychologist, I'd
say that if he's gruff, it's because his enjoyment of his
participation in this project is tied to his interaction with fellow
hackers, and the hacker ratio is dropping.
Am I an expert in shell scripts? Not by any measure. Am I
competent? I don't know. I'm not very good at them, that's for sure.
Still, given the chance to flame me for asking a question I probably
could have eventually figured out by reading manpages and other
install scripts and answering it, he chose to answer it, so I figure I
must have passed some sort of basic scrutiny. And I suspect that
that's all he was really requiring (I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm
wrong :) For what it's worth, I appreciate his interest, in the
project and in up-and-coming developers, and I'm glad he was around.
> I see this email list providing two basic "services" for me and
> other developers. The first is that dh_make and friends may not
> meet the policy, we need to know where these differences are.
You mean deb-make? I don't have a dh_make command on my system...
Am I missing something?
> I think a lot of us have forgotten the developers out there, trying
> to package stuff correctly but not sure how.
Actually, just fixing up the documentation (packaging manual, etc)
would be of the greatest help. At least for single-binary packages, the
system was so automated, it kind of scared me. Trick was knowing which
tools to use where. I use the dh_ scripts because they save me quite a
bit of time, but they weren't by any means critical. Just really handy to
have around. The manuals, on the other hand, were not only critical
to me figuring out how to do things, but also... somewhat imperfect
in spots. When I get free breathing room to type things up I've got
some suggestions for additions and such, but that may wait a little
while...
Looking back upon what I've just written, I'm wondering... why is
this still being discussed in debian-policy, anyway?
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Zed Pobre <zcp@po.cwru.edu> | PGP key on servers, fingerprint on finger
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