Re: slack2deb script and controversy

[Alan Eugene Davis <adavis@kuentos.guam.net>]

On Thu, 22 Feb 1996, William S. Gribble wrote:

>  - exactly what software is lacking from Debian?  I ask because I'd like
>    to hear about interesting stuff that I don't know about, and maybe make 
>    debian packages. 

A few right off, but there are surely lots more:


>From Sunsite:
	uncompress (perhaps it is a non-free?)
        zip/unzip
        ls color
	jed: an emacs clone, fast to boot, very close to emacs 
        sc is apparently unix standard, and is able to output LaTeX tables.
        various graphics viewers
        I've got emacs 19.30 from Slackware---it's significantly
            changed; GNU/Linux should surely be up to date on this (it
            was up on Sunsite in two days of its release.

Utilities and applications from  Sunsite (as source)

	Saw a filesystem to read/write dos compressed filesystem
	Mac compression utilities I needed to solve a problem
	Little stuff
	raytracing
	other graphics

I'd like to see a spectrum of graphics libraries available:
    pnglib
    libjpeg
    ?pbmlib   
(and the facility available for conversion).


Alot of software is around the net all ready for linux.   
I thought that having pointers would be useful, but need to have a way to 
get them into debian.  You will never be albe to cover everything,

    Big packages I have running but which may be too big to package:
    	GRASS
    	Postgres95 compiled and is running 	
    	ADA (GNAT)

    Other interesing software around:
	xephem  or 
        ephem        (astronomical ephemeris: there were linux
                         binaries on the net)           
        another astronomical calendar or ephemeris program(s)
	And still looking for more.

        xtide
 	various x applications built without complaint
                 xantfarm
	         xdaliclock
		 xarclock
	

Like to see:

    units (standard unix?)
    xview X-window manager?
    Imagemagick
    netPBM  
	


>  - what documentation is missing from Debian that you miss from Slackware? 
>    I haven't used Slackware in about 2 years, so I don't know what the
>    state of the art is in docs.  

What I liked about the LDP was that one isn't assumed to be an idiot:
I like the uphill battle, I appreciated that the basic information was
there.

I'd like to see a treatment of the /etc/ directory and (of course) a
man page for dpkg.  More nuts and bolts on how to get the system to
where one can do what he'd like with it.  

>  - what kind of ``tweaking'' do you want to do that debian doesn't allow? 
>    If there's some flexibility that's missing, it's important to know about 
>    it.   

What I have had to do with Slackware would be, perhaps, to do a link
to a library that some package didn't see.  Hopefully things would
eventually standardize.  But imagine if I had set this up, then had a
package write over or delete the link.  

It's not that debian doesn't allow it, but if debian's installation
scripts get too fancy, I won't have confidence that I will know what
they did...