Dear Hilko,
First, I would like you thank you for the interest you showed in the
package I've decided to work on. With that said, let me tell you it is
uncool with me the fact that you started working on it when I told[0] you
that I'd be working on it. That was the plain truth, and in fact my own Bro
package was ready and being reviewed by my sponsor.
[0] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=752546#20
I will assume good faith from your side and propose that we work
together. Let me explain to you the big picture of the situation, why I
have decided not to package binpac, and where we are going by packaging
this project together.
When I started working on Bro, the first dependency I was going to package
was binpac. I started to see how the software worked and realized it
distributed a library. The library wasn't needed by the binpac compiler,
but by the code generated by binpac. I thought about making it a shared
library because by default Bro would use it as a static one. I didn't want
to distribute a static library because of possible security issues (think
about the zlib mess). The problem with this approach is that upstream, due
to the static nature of the library, doesn't care about the SONAME. This
fact adds unneeded complexity to the packaging, and that was the reason why
I've decided not to package binpac. But that decision was made because
there was a plan B. I could perfectly pick the Bro's full distribution and
make the corresponding binary packages without generating a binpac binary
package, because it's only a build dependency.
Since that decision was made, I've been working on packaging Bro using its
full distribution. In fact, the package was almost finished a few days
earlier than your ITP's blocking bugs. As you can tell, my approach was
quite different from yours. I've one source package generating several
binary packages (among them, broctl and bro-utils, the last one containing
trace-summary and capstats). Don't get me wrong, I prefer the approach of
packaging each sub-project individually, but due to the decision I've made,
that wasn't possible.
Now things are different, because you've decided that binpac is good enough
to be in the repositories, and I'm cool with that. So I'll go back to the
approach of packaging each project individually, and you're very welcome to
help if you want to. We could do it via collab-maint, as you've
proposed. Heck, we could even start a team if more contributors are
interested!
In the following minutes I'll be submitting ITPs for bro-aux, broctl and
its dependencies. For the moment, I'm not interested in packaging
broccoli. I'd like to focus on integrating Bro with Debian first.
About the Bro package, I'll ask you for some time for reviewing what you
made and integrating it with my work. I really liked some of the things you
did. Here[1] is the link to my repo, in case you want to see my work.
[1] http://git.kalgan.cc/?p=debian-pkg-bro.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/development
Thanks,
Raúl Benencia
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature