On Mon, 02 Dec 2002, Xavian-Anderson Macpherson wrote:
> On Monday 2002 December 02 13:14, Peter Palfrader wrote:
> > On Mon, 02 Dec 2002, Xavian-Anderson Macpherson wrote:
> > > > Debian packages tend to be more true to the original source than those
> > > > of other large distributions.
> > >
> > > This is why I said no one should have the right to do this. There needs
> > > to be a rigid air-traffic control system, just as there is on any major
> > > airport. If you want to change course, you have to get permission first,
> > > not after you have already crashed!
> >
> > Sorry, but that simply doesn't work. It might in a perfect world but we
> > are _far_ from that.
> >
> > Upstream loses interest in their work but bugs need to get fixes still.
> > Sometimes upstream has /interesting/ ideas about where files should be
> > (like everything below /var/MTA/ or something like that). This violates
> > every idea of a normal Unix system tree - we fix this if possible. There
> > are several other good reasons for distributions overriding upstream.
>
> Would this be an issue if 'upstream' could not violate the actions of those
> 'cross-stream'?
You know, if I was a bird I could fly. There will always be upstream
that doesn't get it.
Also there are other things. One upstream thinks that editor should
default to vim, yet another one might prefer emacs. There's nothing
wrong with that per se.
But on a _system_ you want some kind of uniformity. Imagine how annoying
it would be to have crontab call emacs, mutt call nvi, cvs joe and
subversion ed.
We in Debian "fix" this with our policy that the editor should always be
»sensible-editor« (or something with the same behaviour). Read its
manpage and read the Debian policy which can be found at
http://www.debian.org/devel/ to understand more about this.
Also there's the menu system. If you've used Debian with a graphical
user interface you probably have noticed that most applications you've
installed somehow are there. How do you think they got there? By magic?
Creating packages, maintaining them, keeping them up to date and always
ensure that they comply with the policy is a time consuming and
not seldom tricky task.
If it was as simple as you'ld like it, there would be no need for a
distribution at all. You could just get _the_one_ binary which you seem
to like so much from _the_one_ maintainer who always gets it right and
it would just work.
Fact is, it isn't that simple.
yours,
peter
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