Re: Why is troubleshooting Linux so hard?
Dne, 17. 11. 2010 15:56:09 je Jesús M. Navarro napisal(a):
And that's exactly why this wouldn't work for software: where's the
governing
body for programs? where's the authority to prosecute those not
abiding to
regulations?
There's no need for that, because, as you said:
The best you can do is promoting sane standards and hope for others
to follow
you.
Exactly. It's like promoting non-HTML mail -- if the standard you
promote is sane enough, you should have no problem in finding a more or
less considerable number of followers.
Of course I'd surely want Debian Developers giving efforts not only on
packaging (and, heck, they usually do a damn good work of it) but
that they
were wisely/magically choosing what software to package under the
highest
levels of quality, engineering and maintainability and, on top to
that,
either developing themselves for the "holes" they'd found for such a
highest
standards or successfully tutorizing other upstream maintainers in
such
convincing manners that they'd either thankfully accepted their
patches
and/or made their own developments of better quality.
Agreed, Debian Developers are already doing a huge -- and excellent --
job and I would never dream of burdening them with additional tasks.
However, Debian is generally well respected within the FLOSS world, and
Debian Developers could leverage that respect in order to gently
"suggest" or "recommend" certain "best practices". What I have in mind
is *not* a Linux police, not even "tutorizing" (as you say), but
something simple and unpretentious, like pointing out that, to Debian,
certain "best practices", although not binding in any way, are, let's
put it this way, "more welcome than others". If these "best practices"
were sensible, surely [some] upstream developers would embrace [some
of] them simply on the ground of them being sane, sensible, practical,
and for the common good.
Actually, I'm sure this is already happening all the time. For example,
I'm subscribed to debian-legal, and there I see many examples of Debian
Packagers suggesting various license modifications to upstream
developers in order to bring them into compliance with DFSG. Well, it
may come as a surprise, but more often than not, the responses from
upstream are positive! If you give them sane, sensible, well-founded
suggestions, many developers are actually willing to modify their
software licenses without much further ado.
Of course, the respect enjoyed by Debian in the FLOSS community --
specifically, Debian's firm stance about software freedom and licensing
-- *may* have to do something with it. Why not leverage that?
--
Cheerio,
Klistvud
http://bufferoverflow.tiddlyspot.com
Certifiable Loonix User #481801 Please reply to the list, not to
me.
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