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Bug#524135: Progress of Packaging



[ Patrick Datko ]
> Package: #524135
> Severity: normal
> 
> I wanted to know, how is the progress of packaging
> this project, because I need this to package HBase.

I've been meaning to update this report for some time, and I knew when I
saw the ITP for HBase that today was the day. :)

The truth is that I have not made any headway on this in quite sometime,
and it's not for lack of time or motivation, (I'm also in need of this for
a project). The reason I've held off is that (a) under ideal
circumstances packaging/maintaining Thrift would be non-trivial, and (b)
circumstances are far from ideal.

I blogged[1] last year about the challenges of packaging Thrift, but the
executive summary is that it covers a lot of different languages and
frameworks. I had made it as far as 10 binary packages[2] and was still
missing some popular ones (PHP for example). I'd hoped that some 
co-maintainers would step forward to help, but none did.

[1]: http://blog.sym-link.com/2009/05/01/thrift_packaging.html
[2]: http://git.debian.org/?p=users/eevans/thrift.git;a=summary

Additionally, I've also become increasingly concerned about the state of
the Thrift project.

Thrift was open sourced 3 years ago and has been in the Apache Incubator
for almost 2 years. During that time they've only managed to make one
release, (which incidentally is unsuitable for my project[3]; we're forced
to use a newer snapshot). Bugs are often disregarded or dismissed out of
hand and patches languish for months (or longer). As of right now, there
are 180 open bug reports[4], and some of those are quite serious[5].
 
[3]: http://cassandra.apache.org
[4]: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT
[5]: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/THRIFT-601 (for example)

So part of my reticence has been about taking on a package like this by
myself, and part of it is that I'm not at all convinced that you can
expect even nominal assistance from upstream.

Having said that, if there were enough extra hands/eyeballs, I might be
willing to pick this back up, but I'd also be fine with someone more
enthusiastic taking it over entirely.

-- 
Eric Evans
eevans@debian.org

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