On Thu, Jun 07, 2012 at 01:22:16PM +0100, Neil McGovern wrote:
> If someone wants to take whatever Ian's script produces and package it,
> that's fine, although I'm not entirely convinced how useful that would
> be. Having maintained 'blootbot' in the past, packaging programs that
> are substantially used just on Debian services isn't actually a
> productive use of time.
OTOH it's not surprising that devotee is used only by Debian if even
Debian Developers have troubles finding its sources :-)
As a data point: I've been asked a few times (5-6 range, IIRC, but I
could check my archives) by other projects if they could reuse devotee
for their own voting, as they wanted to give email voting a try over
webapps. I had to say "yes, but..." because it was non trivial to deploy
and because it's tightly coupled with Debian's LDAP.
But I'm convinced that if the dependency can be loosened and if the
software were just a "apt-get install devotee" away, others will use
it. And it will also be a good service to be offered to various
communities. (Not to mention that it would become easier to find people
to fix bugs, such as the PRNG issue.)
No blame whatsoever is intended in the above: devotee has been developed
for Debian purposes and it's serving us well as it is. But I do
challenge the argument that devotee is not interesting/useful for
others, because I don't think it is distributed in a way that is
comparable with usual free software standards.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} . o .
Maître de conférences ...... http://upsilon.cc/zack ...... . . o
Debian Project Leader ....... @zack on identi.ca ....... o o o
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