Re: Suggestion for next Debian release
* Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org) spake thusly:
> On Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 12:51:48PM -0600, Dimitri Maziuk wrote:
> > As far as I can tell the bug is between maintainer's chair and
> > keyboard. I don't see how filing a bug against $PACKAGE will fix
> > that, I fully expect that bug to be marked "wontfix". Ridiculing
> > the guy in public, OTOH, might work.
>
> You are on crack. The maintainer's bug report against debhelper
> explicitly said that he didn't like the dependency on xutils.
I'm on pot actually. I'm whining about a general QA problem of
which bitchx/debhelper is just a particular example.
It's not that hard to do something stupid at 4am when you've just
spent 8 hours trying to work around a bug in (let's say, for example)
debhelper; one should stop and think for a moment before uploading
(just like one should stop and read the command before pressing Enter,
it may read "rm -rf / stuff" instead of "rm -rf /stuff").
Otherwise you may end up doing something plainly ridiculous, like
making a command-line irc client depend on half the X Window System.
(And that may well be acceptable at times, e.g. when you're uploading
a critical security fix. But in many cases it may be better to *not*
upload the package until the bug in $foo is fixed).
This is not a bug in a particular package, it's the maintainer losing
sight of -- whatever you'd call it, big picture, common sense...
I also claim that it's just a matter of time before someone makes
their $foo depend on $bar because they [don't have time|can't be
bothered] to create a separate $libfoobar0g package with one shared
library in it. With similar results (or worse). Ask Murphy if don't
believe me.
And "it's unstable" is not a very good excuse for not thinking.
Dima
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