Bug#126901: acknowledged by developer (Freedicts)
On Monday, April 29, 2002, at 09:49 AM, Cosimo Alfarano wrote:
Why you packaged it ignoring my ITP?
Why you are telling me it *NOW*, after upload?
Because your ITP was filed 4 months ago for only 4 packages. I packaged
40. It seemed to me to be so substantially different that you were not
even proposing the same thing that I was.
- I spent my time in studing and packaging them
Yet no packages were uploaded, no status update was logged in the bug
report, and no information was posted anywhere indicating that this was
anything but an ITP that someone gave up on (like, for instance, #138190)
Furthermore, since your ITP was filed, I had written the dictdlib API
for Python that permits me to automatically generate control files and
.debs from a base of dictionaries such as this. It will permit the
single source idea while still making it easy to handle upgrades in an
automated fashion.
- In the meanwhile I was in contact with upstream deciding wether or not
include it in Debian (dicts seems to be old and unmaintained).
last mail with upstream was last week, I'm wainting for an answer.
And this was not logged either. However, on the dict-beta mailing list,
the upstream author is a regular poster.
- In my ITP I explicitly said I would accepted any dict packaging
requests.
It was not clear that you would accept a request for "*", nor that you
intended to do so. In fact, it was clear that you did NOT intend to do
that, since had you intended to do so, there would have been no need to
accept requests in the first part.
- Anyway, even if you considered my ITP "language specific" or too old,
you had to tell me your intention of packaging it. A lot of people
asked me about .debs I have in my apt-able site without any ITP
opened, only because I packaged it with my name in my site.
This was listed nowhere in the ITP. From the information in the ITP, I
concluded that:
1. You were proposing something so far different from me that it was
manifestly something whose result would be something that was clearly a
different beast from that which I propsed. I proposed packaging
freedict-*; you proposed packaging eng2ita and ita2eng (and "possibly"
some others). I had a clear framework for doing this in an automated
and non-error-prone fashion; you clearly did not (else you could have
proposed packaging * yourself). I therefore concluded that "no one else
is already working on your [my] prospective package" and that effort
would not be duplicated (Developers Reference sec 6.1) Your proposal
was listed as "dict-eng2ita: freedict English to Italian dictionary" on
the WNPP page -- that sounds a lot different than what I was doing.
2. The ITP was going nowhere anyway, since it had been four months since
it had been posted and there was still no package or indication of the
reason for the delay. Before even checking WNPP, I had checked the
archive for freedict packages and found none. (Further evidence that no
one else is working on it)
3. I submitted my own ITP for all freedict packages in accordance with
policy.
- If you want to maintain it, do it. But be correct and contact people
asking if you may do anything on their own ITPs.
Based on the facts available to me at the time, I arrived at the
conclusions enumerated above. Whether or not those conclusions are
necessarily 100% accurate has now been thrown into question; however, I
maintain that, given the information available at the time, they were.
I apologize if I have stepped on your toes in any way, but at the same
time I feel that I was able to produce actual results quickly and
covering a much larger expanse than your ITP did.
-- John
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