Re: Debian Maintainers GR Proposal
Le Sat, Jun 23, 2007 at 09:01:51PM +0200, Sven Luther:
>
> First, my mail won't reach the list, since i am currently being unfairly
> censored and banned from posting on debian lists, so if you judge this
> mail worthwhile, you can forward it.
Uh?
> > During my discussions with DDs, I found there is currently no solution
>
> This is where you are wrong. The correct way to handle this, is to be
> part of a team, working on the tex packages and providing fixes, and if
> there is an upload needed, a DD member of the team can make the upload.
>
> This is how many of the debian teams involving non-DDs work, and is the
> way of the future for debian, to have more team maintained package
> groups.
That can be part of a solution. As far as I remember, there was nothing
like a TeX team last time I tried to bing patches to such software, but
perhaps I did not look closely enough.
> Since you didn't go this way, either you didn't know about this
> possibility, or there is some other reason why you don't integrate well
> with the TeX team, which would point out to other kind of problems.
In the TeX team, or in relation with TeX team, are some great experts,
and I do interract well with them when there is an opportunity. By the
way, what is done now in the combination of TeXlive and Debian is very
close to (and seem to take some ideas from) concepts I did present in a
TUG meeting at Oxford in 2000.
I am also a user of xlassie, which I found usefull. I don't know if it
is maintained properly, and if not, I don't know if a team may be
interested in adopting this package.
In my view, a DM can join, or help, a team, right?
> > So, right now, when I have troubles with Debian/TeX stuff, I tend to
> > solve it on my computer, and just report nothing, since reporting is
> > useless.
>
> You know, this argument kind of works against the DM proposal, since one
> part of the upload responsability is to know when to upload and when not
> to, and hijacking a package and doing uploads because you want to fix a
> bug, while at the same time not wanting to take responsability over it
> and become a DD, is probably not the way to go.
Any argument can be used with fair or unfair interpretation. As a
skilled TeXnician, when I claim there is a bug in a software, usually,
one should trust me. I do not speak about the package itself (is the doc
in the right directory, is the licence politically correct, is the tool
used to install the package in the right version, and so on). I only use
a more simple point of view: is the software working or not?
On that topic, I assume everything. If the package is in such a state
that a bug report will sleep in BTS during years, I can upload any fix,
it will still be better than the broken stuff. Since there is no
maintainer, I can promiss to do at least as good as that. And if a DD
want to adopt the package, he is welcome :-)
My point is that, when I find a software that is broken, what should I
do with it if there is no DD to maintain it? Your point leads to
answering "let it be broken, since you do not want to spend hours every
week reading mailing lists".
I clearly do not want to get involved in what is required from a DD
(months arguing issues about licences, reading lists like the one
here, etc).
Make it clear: I understand that the job is usefull. Only that I already do
such job, with such involvment in others projects, and days only have 24
hours. I do not wish to do that on Debian. I have no free time to do
that, and if I would have some free spare time, I would use it to help
the LaTeX3 team, or to finish my book, or...
So the point is: a guy, quite skilled in his domain, have a
contribution to make. Should the contribution be accepted, and if so
how, or should it be dropped?
The state of the art, in 2004, was to drop. Right now, there is a
skilled TeX team working, which would probably be enough for most of my
needs. But I'm pretty sure there are plenty of other examples, on other
topics: how to accept contributions comming from non DDs ?
Regards,
Benjamin.
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