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Re: Alternative proposal: reaffirm maintainers technical competence over the software they maintain



On 20/10/14 at 22:26 +0200, Arno Töll wrote:
> That's - I think - a good default and affirms Debian's point of view
> that the respective maintainers can judge best what's a good requirement
> for their packages. Finally I encourage everyone to focus on the
> connotation in Luca's amendment. It allows maintainers to tie their
> software to a particular init system only as a last resort when
> absolutely necessary - not by pure choice, or by laziness.

I disagree with this interpretation.

We have processes in place in Debian to deal with such last resort situations:
- someone opens an RC bug against the package, stating why it is
  unsuitable for release
- the release team reviews the bug, and might (or not) mark it with the
  jessie-ignore tag

That process works well: someone (the maintainer) is in charge of doing
their best to fix the bug, while someone else (the release team) is in
charge of evaluating whether, in a last resort situation, it's better to
use a dirty work-around (= require another init system) or just remove the
package.

With Luca's proposal, the maintainer is now in charge of doing a
self-evaluation of whether a given bug is unfixable enough to justify
being worked-around.

Also, the maintainer does not even need to try to fix the problem:
showing that there are no patches or other derived works to fix it is a
sufficient condition to consider the bug unfixable.

I think that this would be a significant step backward in the way we
promote consistent technical practices in all Debian packages.

Lucas

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