Re: Debian Math Team
Hi Nilesh,
On 2021-11-04 13:13, Nilesh Patra wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 04, 2021 at 11:48:45AM +0200, Andrius Merkys wrote:
>> Maybe separate mailing lists could be enough? In the end
>> upstreams mostly work on one-two source packages, and even if they
>> become DMs they do not get push/upload permissions for all source
>> packages of a team, do they?
>
> I think this point is not exactly a discussion for the mathematics team, but
> pretty much several other teams (i.e separate lists, etc)
> Since this looks (to me) very generic and not very specific, maybe you'd
> want to ask -devel for more opinions, but.... :)
I agree, this is a topic for a separate discussion :)
>>> since R packages are extremely uniform and
>>> usually come with test suites that can be re-used which to some extend
>>> is taking over the role of an expert knowing the software. There are
>>> also not really any specific decisions to make about the packaging since
>>> everything is really straightforward.
>>>
>>> This is absolutely different to software written in Python, Java or
>>> anything else.
>>
>> I disagree. I find at least JavaScript and Perl packages quite uniform,
>> and I have an impression that at least
>
> I cannot say about perl, but your argument is certainly invalid for javascript team.
> My journey to contributing in debian started with JS team, and I've been involved there
> ever since (few years by now), and no, they are _not_ uniform.
> Several packages need much more work than the defaults and maintaining JS is also more work
> for more techinal reasons (like embedding node modules for instance)
>
> Several packages come with typescript defs, and you need to take care of them.
> They come with varieties of build systems - webpack, rollup, grunt then terser, uglifyjs for
> minifying and what not.
> In majority of the JS packages I've touched (several dozens by now) I almost always had
> to do something more than just running some scripts and I can attest to that.
Interestingly, my experience is different. Most of JS packages I deal
with are rather uniform, but maybe it is just luck.
> A couple of years back, there was no pkg-js-tools (sort of a debhelper sort of tool for JS team) and
> the work was even more. Yadd later wrote this nice tool that automates a number of tasks, and maybe that
> gives you an impression that stuff is unform - sure, it has improved a lot, but you cannot compare it with
> R packages. You can maintain R packages without knowing the build system very well, but not JS.
Maybe it is just pkg-js-tools, yes. When I came to JS packaging,
pkg-js-tools were already there, so I have no experience with the
situation before that. Nevertheless, thanks to pkg-js-tools, JS packages
look quite uniform to me now :)
Apart from that, maintainers of the JS team do great deal of (seemingly
semi-automated) improvements on team-maintained packages. Thus I am
happy about my JS packages in JS team as they are taken care of even
without my attention.
> In case of R packages, dh-R takes care of literally everything. Ofcourse there are exceptions,
> but they are very rare. A template legit works just okay, always.
OK, good to know.
Best,
Andrius
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