Re: PEP 453 affects Debian packaging of Python packages

On 20 September 2013 10:52, Paul Tagliamonte <paultag@debian.org> wrote:

If a library breaks API because the maintainer wanted another toy
rewrite, we're not going to upload it and break half the archive. That's
silly.

This condescending attitude towards developers ('another toy rewrite') doesn't help. Work with upstream developers to understand what they're doing, encourage them to care about API stability and to use conventions like semantic versioning and deprecation warnings to reduce the impact of changes. There are plenty of developers who do care about backwards compatibility.

We could also have topic-specific extra repos, so that a user can add, say, a Python-science repo to get newer versions of some packages by accepting a bit of extra risk associated with that. Neurodebian offers something like that, but in general it's hard to set up. Ubuntu PPAs are much easier to get set up, but don't build for Debian relases.

Hell, we shouldn't even introduce a module unless it has an app using
it.

- This gives module authors little to no incentive to get involved in Debian packaging.

- In scientific Python, the expectation is that *users* will import and use modules directly. Likewise, most code that depends on a package like Django is not going to be packaged as a Debian app. I don't think Debian has some special insight into what currently unpackaged things users want.

We care more about users than developers. Python developers can use
virtualenv and pip on Debian like any other Python development env.

Believe it or not, developers care about users as well. That's why we're writing code and fixing bugs. We want the people using our software to have the best possible experience. However, we regularly see bug reports for problems where we have already released a fix, because users are on outdated versions. So, upstream projects are increasingly inclined to bypass distros and offer their software to users by a more direct route.

Again, it feels like packagers see developers as the enemy. Yes, developers will at times do things that you disagree with, but fundamentally we are on the same team. We both want to deliver great software to users. If you fight developers, you will lose, by sheer weight of numbers.

Thomas