Re: About the recent DD retirements
]] Anthony Towns
> 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.
This also points at something not explicitly mentioned: Our support for
multiple versions of the same package is pretty much non-existent. (You
can hard-code the version into the package name. This causes NEW pain,
this kinda breaks dependencies and doesn't map well to how at least some
languages like Ruby handles dependencies.)
This means that if you use system packages and want to have two
applications that both want foo.jar installed, but different versions
(since they need different APIs or different bug compatibility), we
don't support that well. For C libraries, there are sonames and all,
but those largely doesn't exist for other languages and fixing that
would be a huge undertaking with, IMO, pretty poor prospects for
success.
--
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are
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