On Tue, 2012-02-14 at 14:28:58 +0000, Ian Jackson wrote: > I think the refcounting approach is very worthwhile because it > eliminates unnecessary work (by human maintainers) in many simple > cases.
Aside from what I said on my other reply, I just wanted to note that this seems to be a recurring point of tension in the project when it comes to archive wide source package changes, where supposed short term convenience (with its usually long term harmful effects) appears to initially seduce people over what seems to be the cleaner although slightly a bit more laborious solution. Other recent-ish incarnations of this tension could be the build-arch build-indep targets, or the build flag settings; where the former got recently resolved so that the right thing to do is for *all* packages needing to eventually support those targets, or for the latter which got switched from the seemingly more convenient to the more laborious but correct solution, that is, *all* packages need to set those build flags by themselves. This is a fundamental issue with how our source packages are handled, and the freedom and power it gives to experiment and implement them whatever way the maintainer wants, has the price that doing some archive wide changes is sometimes more costly, than changing something centrally and be done with it. But trying to workaround this by coming up with stacks of hacked up solutions will not solve that fundamental issue, and this kind of tension will keep coming up again and again, as long as the foundation is not reworked. Either that, or the project needs to accept that fact and learn to live with this kind of changes, with patience. regards, guillem -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-dpkg-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120215011510.ga15...@gaara.hadrons.org
