Re: Standardization, large scale changes, innovations
On Wed, Mar 31 2010, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> 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.
Abillity to understand fairly simple shell script is not a
matter of tenure. It is a matter of competence. I am dismayed that a
fairly bland invocation of find seems opaque, in your opinion, to
people coming into the project today. I hope that is not indeed
true. Personally, I find a small shell snippet to be clearer than a
reference to a external program, and when finding myself stuck in
RHEL-land, my packages build, and would have caused more pain were they
dependent on helper packages. I find that justification enough.
> 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.
That would be the naive way to implement things. And yes, that
would be sillly.
I just update code in one place, test it, and then run a script
that does a git pull for all my packages. The next time I build the
package, it will pull in the change.
> This doesn’t raise questions about the competence of the newcomer. This
> raises questions about the competence of the person who designed the
> package.
I am happy you have an opinion. I don't think much of it, but
you are indeed entitled to it.
manoj
--
How untasteful can you get?
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@acm.org> <http://www.golden-gryphon.com/>
4096R/C5779A1C E37E 5EC5 2A01 DA25 AD20 05B6 CF48 9438 C577 9A1C
Reply to:
- References:
- Standardization, large scale changes, innovations
- From: Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>
- Re: Standardization, large scale changes, innovations
- From: Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@ieee.org>
- Re: Standardization, large scale changes, innovations
- From: Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>
- Re: Standardization, large scale changes, innovations
- From: Marc Haber <mh+debian-vote@zugschlus.de>
- Re: Standardization, large scale changes, innovations
- From: Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org>
- Re: Standardization, large scale changes, innovations
- From: Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org>
- Re: Standardization, large scale changes, innovations
- From: Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>
- Re: Standardization, large scale changes, innovations
- From: Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@ieee.org>
- Re: Standardization, large scale changes, innovations
- From: Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org>