Should I consider making my program part of the distribution?
Hello.
I think I need some advice on this: I've written a (small) Perl
program and am considering sharing it with other users who might be
interested. Thus I thought I could contribute to Debian and make it
a part of its distribution.
But many things come to my mind. First, is the fact I've written
something enough to put it in the archives? Probably not. So what is
it, that makes a program worth it? I've come to the conclusion that
it need not necessarily be GIMP or something that complex or even
that useful. I've checked the length of various scripts in the
/usr/bin directory: it varies from 3 to 4000! Consider, for example,
/usr/bin/mcheck: 45 lines, 17 are comments, or /usr/bin/uz, which
gunzips and extracts archives -- 60 lines with comments. It's great
we have those reliable scripts for such easy tasks.
I, for instance, use "pon" very often. Examining the code shows me
that it's basically just about the same as calling "pppd call
provider" with some tests as a bonus. One of my first scripts (and
still the most frequently used) consists of something like pon
provider; getmail; poff -- it suits my needs.
What I want to say is that I'd like to know who is to decide if a
program gets included. Is everything included just if you care to
package it?
So my script gives me the sum of all the time I was connected to the
internet, since I still use ppp, or the duration of the current
connection. Nothing special, but again, who is to decide? To me
it's better than, say, pppstatus or any of the programs for X. So
isn't this a good reason for using it? Besides, scripts like pon are
aimed at beginners who can't write such a script by themselves --
so there, those who want to use my little script for any reason can
have it! I remember the thread about the drawbacks of too many
choices ... Still, I think it could be a valuable contribution.
Otherwise, why not write a whole new kernel from scratch?! I don't
intend to rewrite pon just because I think I _could_ do it.
Now, how should I proceed? (In the meantime, I'll start with reading
the Debian Policy Manual and the New Maintainers' Guide :))
andrej
--
echo ${girl_name} > /etc/dumpdates
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