Re: [draft] Draft text on Init Systems GR
Sean Whitton writes:
> On Fri 08 Nov 2019 at 04:51PM +01, Ansgar wrote:
>> We already have people complaining that source packages are "too Debian
>> specific" and should be replaced. The tooling above is even more of a
>> problem as third parties currently have to deal with way too many
>> different ways to even before getting to packaging which is inherently
>> more package-manager- and thus distribution(-familiy)-specific.
>
> If you're referring to those of us who aren't keen on the .dsc transport
> format, I think that the point is orthogonal. What we're talking about
> in this thread is the contents of binary packages.
No, but maybe I expressed myself badly: we have people that complain
that building Debian source packages with a Debian-specific command is a
too high burden. This is independent of how source is represented (Git,
.dsc, rpm, Git+LFS, only-debian/-Git+tar, references to external
artifacts, ...).
So some people believe that "Debian-specific tooling is bad", even for
Debian-specific work.
> The reasons that there might be for reducing the amount of
> Debian-specific stuff in binary packages are quite different from the
> reasons for reducing the amount of Debian-specific stuff used in moving
> source code around.
>
> The basic reason for that is that what we are trying to produce is an
> operating system composed, roughly, of binary packages; we have produced
> ways to move source code around only incidentally to that.
Yes, and the software that gets packaged needs to interact with the rest
of an operating system in ways that upstream has to deal with. They
benefit from common tooling across several distributions. Additionally
it also reduces workload for people maintaining software in Debian.
In my opinion enabling the use of such tooling is quite useful and a
logical continuation of what already happened with, for example,
abstraction layers around session management for desktop environments.
Note that Debian already adopted these.
We also decreased use of Debian-specific tools such as the
Debian-specific menu system.
In some way this is "Debian-specific tooling is bad for tasks that are
not Debian-specific", that is a weaker version of the position above.
(This doesn't mean we shouldn't decrease Debian-specific tooling for
Debian-specific work if we can reasonably do so.)
Ansgar
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