Re: Packaging Policy.

[Chris Gray <cgray@tribsoft.com>]

>>>>> Joey Hess writes:

    jh> Chris Gray wrote:
    cp> recall. Now I don't know what the status of the maintainer of
    cp> this package is, but what are the Debian policy/ethical issues
    cp> involved if I suddenly piped up and said I had [unofficial?]
    cp> packages available for this?
    >>> 
    >>> It's called hijacking a package, and would be unethical unless you
    >>> made it very clear that your package is unofficial.

    jh> Er, no it's not. It's called putting a deb up in an unofficial
    jh> apt repository. People do it all the time, and there is
    jh> nothing unethical about it. This is free fortware, remember?

That's why I put "But you have to be a developer to do that." at the
end of my paragraph.  Of course it should be clear that your package
is not official if it's not in the official ftp site, but it is better
to err on the side of safety.  

For example, how about this?

-----

I, Chris Gray, have the official wmnetselect package on my apt site, 

http://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~cgray4

-----

Since I'm not the maintainer (you are), isn't what I have just done
unethical?  

    jh> "hijacking a package" is very bad loaded terminology that
    jh> makes some hidden (and IMHO invalid) assumptions about the way
    jh> Debian works. More importantly, you need an account on
    jh> ftp-master to do it.

You are right about this.  My point was that taking over a package and
calling it official without the maintainer's knowledge is not very
nice.  Since Corey is probably not about to do this, it was probably
not the best language to use.

Cheers,
Chris

By the way, would you mind sponsoring my wmnetselect package? :)

-- 
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