On Fri, 16 May 2008, Martin Uecker wrote: > Requiring distro specific changes feels wrong anyway. Software > should be coupled by standardized interfaces. But I might be naive > here. What are the distro specific changes we are talking about?
It'd be great[0] if we never had to do distribution specific changes.[1] However, considering the amount of software which is not LSB compliant, FHS compliant, policy compliant, ships internal libraries, has upstreams who don't understand API and ABIs, has slow release cycles, has insane upstreams, or otherwise includes bugs which need to be fixed, that'll only rarely be the case for some very simple packages. Even so, most developers and maintainers actively work to reduce the size of the diff.gz that they ship by sending patches upstream, if for no other reason than doing so means that they don't have to deal with merging back in Debian specific patches later. Those who are concerned about what happened in the ssl case are welcome and encouraged to assist maintainers in examining the patches made to software, and liasing with upstream for useful patches, and discussing questionable packages. [Use Luciano as an example: he actually found a mistake while those of us discussing this thread engage the barn door.] At the end of the day, we're here to make the most technically excellent distribution we can make. That means making changes, and sometimes we make mistakes. Finding and fixing those mistakes and spreading the changes to everyone is what we should be doing. Don Armstrong 0: We could just ship a universal diff.gz that installed a very simple debian/rules file that called dh, and we could spend the rest of our time making macros, drinking arrak, and playing tetrinet! 1: One could argue that if you can't come up with a relatively large list of distribution specific changes that need to be made yourself, you've not done the research to make useful suggestions for radically altering how Debian actually does development. Knowing the problem comes before the knowing answer. -- No amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free [...] You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him. -- Robert Heinlein _Revolt in 2010_ p54 http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]