Bug#703762: ITP: jdownloader -- download manager for one-click hosting sites

[Jonathan Dowland <jmtd@debian.org>]

On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 01:29:13PM +0100, Benjamin Drung wrote:
> Am Samstag, den 23.03.2013, 13:13 +0100 schrieb Michael Stapelberg:
> > Could you instead package jdownloader itself?
> 
> I tried, but failed miserable. Some libraries needs to be packaged and
> the upstream build system needs to be bent to build on Debian. I would
> love to ditch the launcher and replace it with a proper package. This is
> a lot of work. Until this work is done, I like to have this launcher in
> the contrib archive. This is suboptimal, but better than nothing.

I'm not sure it *is* better than nothing, it could actually be worse. If you
don't personally have the time to "do it properly", why not try and put 
together a team to do it? If you do a downloader instead, what you do is
partially and sub-optimally meet the demand for a jdownloader package, which
will dilute the motivation for people to work on a proper solution. Then we
end up stuck with the sub-optimal solution.

I think downloader packages where required for licensing reasons are an uneasy
necessary evil, but for when the maintainer doesn't have time to package
something? This seems like a really slippery slope to me.

-- 
Jonathan Dowland