Package: aptitude
Version: 0.2.11.1-4
Severity: wishlist
This is a wishlist item I filed in 2005.
The archived bug number is 300759. You can see the Debian report log
for this bug @ http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=300759.
After remaining silent for more than 3 years, Daniel Burrows
decided to close it in August 2008 without any discussion with
me (the submitter) or the members of the Debian community that were
in favor of that change.
Because it was archived, I had no other possibility to reply than to fill
it again.
So here is the message that I reveived from Daniel Burrows after 3 years:
" I don't know why this was never closed, but it has never been a bug
and it continues to not be a bug. There are enough real bugs that
there's no reason to keep this one open.
Daniel
"
This is my reply:
"
This has been filed with a severity of wishlist. So you're actually right,
this is a wishlist item, as understood by Debian, rather than a bug, but we
already knew this, right?
The idea of removing useless game from a package manager software is
there to keep the number of bugs low, as in 'less useless code == less
bugs'.
As a package maintainer, you should probably focus yourself on fixing
actual bugs rather than arbitrarily closing wish requests to keep
the number of bugs artificially low. Doing this without any preceding
discussion with the submitter, even though the community seems to be
following the reasoning behind the wish is a nonsense and a lack of
respect. Especially in the context of a community based distribution
like Debian.
David Orban.
"
And this is my original submission:
"
I am wondering why the minesweeper feature has been included in packages
management software or its front-end.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that aptitude is meant to become an
important package in future Debian distributions (i.e. called from
debian-installer and maybe even considered as a replacement for dselect).
Part of the basics of UNIX philosophy is to build programs that do only
one thing and do it well. While it is obvious that such rules can
sometimes be overruled, I can't find good arguments for this in this
case. The whole system reliability depends on package such as this one
and for that reason it doesn't look very serious to bring additional
code, documentation and complexity for a feature which is neither
necessary nor related to package management.
IMHO, OS's mechanisms such as VTs should be used and minesweeper should
be in its own package. For specific hardware or custom built kernels
where VTs are not available, appropriate mechanisms should be used.
I would like to know both the community and the author opinions about
these thoughts. If one of them agrees, then the feature should probably
be removed.
Regards,
David Orban.
"
As can be seen, I was asking for a discussion with the community and
the maintainer and it seems that the maintainer is not really interested.
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