Hi Tim,
On Mon, Aug 01, 2011 at 08:52:12PM +0100, Tim Retout wrote:
> [CCing yada maintainer, to avoid going behind his back with this]
>
> I would like to propose a release goal for wheezy of removing yada from Debian:
>
> http://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/RemoveYada
>
> While accepting that this may attract some controversy, and while
> supporting the principle that package maintainers should be
> responsible for technical decisions about their packages, I believe
> bug #334164 (regarding yada modifying debian/control files during
> build) should be considered serious by the release team.
From the dialog on the bug seems only Build-Depends are adjusted by the
packages existing in the build environment, i.e., not arbitrary rewritting
but a precise one. What has changed in this regard to make it serious?
> Additionally, many packages using yada break Policy 12.5 (regarding
> debian/copyright files in source packages).
Shouldn't these packages be fixed to be policy-compliant instead of
removing the helper tool? Or does yada make impossible to add a copyright
file?
> Many packages that rely on yada are maintained by NMU;
Seems you're trying to associate bad package maintenace with using yada,
which may be true or not ('many' is not a good percentage), anyway to remove
something it must be technically bad by itself not because of the usage the
people makes of it, remember DFSG #6 !
> and use of yada can cause problems for others looking to help with these
> packages.
Well, the same happens for any other $helper you're not familiar with.
Options are to learn the one used in the package or to switch the package
to your $preferred_helper if you're taking over maintenance. There're lots
of languages most of the maintainers are not familiar with either and cannot
help with packaging, do we also remove them?
> Given the availability of other, more widely used helper tools, I
> believe it is less work to migrate the packages currently using yada
> to different systems than it is to fix these problems.
That can already be done, but as said the problems are in the packages
not in the packaging tool. Maybe should we issue a ReleaseGoals/RemoveCDBS
to remove all bugs in packages using CDBS? :)
> I am happy to advocate this goal, and will update the wiki page with a
> BTS usertag if there is agreement from the release team.
I'm happy to help you fixing packages using yada (or any other helper)
but so far I see no valid reason to remove yada itself.
regards from your friendly devil's advocate,
--
Ricardo Mones
~
Never send a human to do a machine's job. Agent Smith
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