On Tue, Oct 12, 2004 at 10:13:58AM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> On Oct 11, Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote:
>
> > Which part about "emergency maintenance" is so hard to understand?
> >
> > The system administrators I know can compile Apache+OpenSSL+PHP from
> > scratch, but would have trouble to apply a PHP security patch to the
> > Debian package (even though most of them have basic experience with
> > the way Debian packages are created).
>
> I do not consider this to be a problem.
I do.
> It would be stupid to add documentation for build systems in every
> non-trivial package.
We clearly disagree, then.
I'm not saying we should start to document how each and every build
system out there works. However, I do think it should be the
maintainer's job to document any out of the ordinary things he did while
creating his package.
We require that binaries in our binary, compiled packages have
documentation through manpages. Why don't we require documentation for
our source packages?
I've had to tweak source packages on quite a number of occasions now
(usually to create custom-configured packages for a project at work),
and this problem has bothered me more than once. The fact that the
source is there does not matter -- the source is there for each and
every binary in our main archive, too, and yet we still do require
documentation.
This bug is not about creating an interface (the interface to building
debian packages is clear enough), nor is it about making it possible to
do stuff which isn't possible right now (you /can/ still do this, if not
as easily as one would want). It's about making the life of someone who
occasionally wants to modify a Debian package, not harder than it should
be.
--
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