Re: Standardization, large scale changes, innovations

[Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org>]

Le mardi 30 mars 2010 à 15:42 -0700, Manoj Srivastava a écrit :
>         I might agree that maintenance of my packages might raise a
>  competence bar for the would-be-maintainer, and some people might fail
>  to meet that bar.

Let’s say we find this in a package:

define create_md5sum
    create_md5sums_fn () {                                         \
        cd $$1 ;                                                   \
       find . -type f                                              \
              ! -regex './DEBIAN/.*'                               \
              ! -regex './var/.*'     $(EXTRA_MD5SUM_EXCLUDE)      \
              -printf '%P\0' | xargs -r0 md5sum > DEBIAN/md5sums ; \
       if [ -z "DEBIAN/md5sums" ] ; then                           \
           rm -f "DEBIAN/md5sums" ;                                \
       fi ;                                                        \
    } ;                                                            \
    create_md5sums_fn
endef

Of course it doesn’t take long for a long-term developer to understand
this is a reimplementation of dh_md5sums. However a newcomer not aware
of your fanatic rejection of any kind of standard tools would absolutely
not understand what this is about. And the same goes about everything
else in the package.

Now when we upgrade our policies and/or infrastructures, like what was
recently proposed for sha1sums instead, this requires manual updating of
all our packages for no good reason.

This doesn’t raise questions about the competence of the newcomer. This
raises questions about the competence of the person who designed the
package.

Cheers,
-- 
 .''`.      Josselin Mouette
: :' :
`. `'   “A handshake with whitnesses is the same
  `-     as a signed contact.”  -- Jörg Schilling