Re: About the recent DD retirements
On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 11:29:19AM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
> Anthony Towns dijo [Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 10:57:55AM +0000]:
> > (Yes, I really think Debian should have 300k+ packages, including
> > everything in all the language archives, no matter how special purposes
> > (compare against the chiark* packages eg).
> My answer to this is that... A distribution should mostly cater to
> users. That means, we should target applications, not libraries.
So I'm going to disagree with that in two ways.
First, and more trivially, is that there are plenty of applications
people want to run, that depend on unpackaged libraries that are a
PITA to package. Etherpad is the example I already gave. Openrocket is
another -- it's packaged as an installer that "downloads the pre-build
OpenRocket .jar file from the upstream site and instals it"; because
openrocket upstream likes using cool new java libraries for features and
java libraries are a pain to package.
ie, not having those libraries easily available in Debianised form /is/
one of the things that prevents people from running apps on Debian.
Second, and more philosophically... Free software's about users not just
being passive consumers, but treating them like co-developers. From
fsf.org: "Free software developers guarantee everyone equal rights
to their programs; any user can study the source code, modify it,
and share the program." If we *really* believe that, then we shouldn't
just be about getting users some nice eary to install prepackaged apps,
we should be about getting them the tools they need to make those apps
do whatever they want, and even make apps of their own. Once upon a
time the C library, a compiler and a debugger were state of the art for
doing that; nowdays, pulling together bits of code from the hundreds of
thousands of pre-written open source modules is.
Oh, and as a bonus: third -- how much easier would packaging applications
be, if all the libraries they used (and all the libraries we currently
maintain) we're already packaged, essentially for free?
> By limiting our scope to what is actually wanted (i.e. by applications
> that have been ITPed or RFPed,
Per the wnpp pages, there are:
* 868 packages being worked on
* 3434 requested packages
That's a total of 4302, compared to 21554 source packages, that's just
under 20%, so about two years worth of backlog at 10% growth in source
packages per year. ie, Debian's already not coming close to keeping up
with the "actually wanted" stuff.
(Also, note that quite a lot of those are modules from various language sites
already)
Cheers,
aj
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