Re: debhelper 7 and python-central
On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 12:49 PM, Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> wrote:
> Le dimanche 18 mai 2008 à 11:35 -0700, Monty Taylor a écrit :
>> 1. What are the real differences between these two?
>
> Technically speaking, they use very different approaches. Python-central
> links modules at their original places while python-support puts them
> in /var/lib to follow the FHS. The latter approach is less fragile
> overall, but for a handful of (IMHO broken) packages it requires a few
> changes (like a different path installation, or moving files to a
> different directory).
>
>> 2. Why, as a packager, would I choose one over the other?
>
> As the python-support maintainer, I could recommend it because it has
> more features, like namespace packages (allowing to split modules coming
> from the same directory in non-interdependent packages), Python-Depends
> (allowing to express Provides: in a way that doesn't break when the list
> of supported python versions changes), or triggers support (leading to
> faster upgrades).
>
> As the maintainer of several python-related packages, I have noticed
> recurrent breakage on user systems caused by bugs in python-central, and
> I avoid it for this precise reason.
>
>> 3. Is there a valid reason to have both of them be acceptable if they
>> both do the same job?
>
> Probably not, but I'm not in the right position to judge.
I am glad this discussion is taking place. I'd like to add this to our
FAQ, is anyone against it?
Matthias Klose, as the maintainer of python-central, do you have any
comments to this? I.e. if the above statements are accurate, it seems
to me that python-support is now better than python-central -- do you
have any plans to fix this, or what is the motivation of
python-central? I know you suggested me to follow the changelog of it
to know what is happening, but I am also interested in your future
plans with it and especially what you don't like on python-support. So
that we can find some common ground and either have two packages if
there are two good approaches to the same thing that people just
cannot agree on one, or just one package if the reason for two
packages are just communication problems that we will fix/explain in
this thread.
Ondrej
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