Re: When stability is pointless
On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 5:40 AM, Nate Duehr <nate@natetech.com> wrote:
> It is very common for software developers to plow ahead without thinking
> much about the versions the distros provide.
>
> You may want to contact them and see how they would expect users to use
> their software effectively.
>
> It's likely: They won't care.
I think that in may cases, this is an unfair characterisation. I'm
biased though, I'm an upstream maintainer. I hardly ever hear from
the distributions, despite the fact that the software I maintain is
installed on over 99% of Linux machines (according to Debian popcon,
about 99.8%). The sole exception is Debian (hi, Andreas!).
I'm pretty sure the reason here is, once again, manpower. The
distibutions include thousands of packages and so the staff who are
paid to look after the distribution hardly have any time at all to
interact with the upstream comunities, at least on average. The
distributions need to figure out where to spend their staff time, and
it unsurprisingly most of it goes on high-priority things like glibc,
Apache, and the kernel, as you say.
Regarding documentation though, I guess the situation is easier in my
case; all the documentation that is available for findutils ships in
the source tarball, so users always have access to a full set of
documentation relevant to the software they are using (they may need
to install a separate -doc package, but that's a whole other
flamewar).
James.
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