Re: Suggestion for next Debian release
On Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 03:50:22PM -0600, Dimitri Maziuk wrote:
> * Colin Watson (cjwatson@debian.org) spake thusly:
> > 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.
So why are you doing it on debian-user, where chances are the only
effect it will have is to generate hot air? Why not file bugs, generally
take the complaint somewhere more appropriate, and in general not start
off with remarks like the one with which you started this thread?
As one of several people spending basically the entire weekend fixing
bugs in an effort to get woody out the door, it's damn annoying when
people can't even be bothered to file bugs about the things they seem to
have time to make overgeneralized rants about. No wonder problems go
unnoticed for months and then pop up just when they're hardest to fix.
For what it's worth, I've just filed a bug report on bitchx about this.
> Otherwise you may end up doing something plainly ridiculous, like
> making a command-line irc client depend on half the X Window System.
Let's see what it actually pulls in, shall we?
Package: bitchx
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.2.4-4), libncurses5 (>= 5.2.20020112a-1), xutils
Package: xutils
Depends: xfree86-common (>> 4.0), libc6 (>= 2.2.4-4), libncurses5 (>= 5.2.20020112a-1), zlib1g (>= 1:1.1.3)
Package: xfree86-common
Depends: debianutils (>= 1.13)
Sure, it's not ideal, but it doesn't even pull in the X libraries. The X
dependencies involved are only around half the size of bitchx itself.
> And "it's unstable" is not a very good excuse for not thinking.
This is entirely true. However, it's a good excuse for being just ever
so slightly calmer about minor issues which the maintainer suggests are
transient.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
Reply to: