Re: Yaboot

[Benjamin Cama <benoar@free.fr>]

Hi,

Le lundi 29 novembre 2010 à 22:55 +0100, Gaudenz Steinlin a écrit :
> Sorry, but that's not the way Free Software works. Don't wait for
> others to tell you what to do, show us the code!

I'm not exactly "waiting" for anyone: I already integrated the latest
yaboot version into the Debian package with some other patches, which
took quite some time. I coded just a bit, though, but I was hoping that
some people would follow. I'm no specialist at all about PPC and stuff,
I did all by myself seeing that almost nobody did anything for some
time. It's just that after some time, seeing you're alone integrating,
coding, patching, fixing bugs in that package, you're a bit discouraged.
There was a lot of people willing to test, but that's only part of the
equation. And I'm not blaming anyone.

> And what you say is even not true. I already said that I will happily
> sponsor a yaboot upload if it fixes reported RC bugs. This is equally
> valid for all the other relevant packages. Also the release team will
> generally approve uploads that fix RC bugs. They want to release
> Debian after all.

I don't see what I said that implied that. I know that you offered
sponsoring, thanks, but the thing is, as of today, this "new" yaboot
fixes no RC bug… So I was trying to do one last thing, which is
integrating Joseph's code, before asking for you to sponsor me. This
way, it would at least fix an RC bug and be accepted by the release
team, I hope. My criticism was about not having answers to my questions
about accepting such a package update (minor version change on a package
not updated in years while debian is frozen).

To fix this problem, other options are replacing ofpath altogether with
Joseph's code, which is too much risky regarding backward compatibility,
I think. Or use ofpathname, which will need some integration work, and
even if it's been more trained than Joseph's code (it's used in GRUB 2),
it could cause some quirks too. But if someone feels like it, let him
code it!

> Milan Kupcevic sent me a yaboot package for review today. I'll look
> into it tomorrow. So your assumption that there is nothing going on is
> simply wrong.

Well, I didn't see any message from him here regarding this issue. I
can't guess what people are doing. Seeing this ML's activity recently, I
was under the impression that everyone had let yaboot down. Nice to here
someone is trying to improve it, but I wonder what solution he found.

Regards,
benjamin