Charles Plessy wrote: > I jump in the discussion to react to Zack's point of view about > packaging: > >> However, in many cases, free software developers tend to reinvent the >> wheel quite often (so two apps can share the exact same goal and have >> very similar designs, the only difference being that one is of less good >> quality than the other). It's generally a bad idea to package both >> apps in this case, because it increases the workload, reduces the >> users-per-package ratio, etc.
Um, those are Lucas Nussbaum's words, not mine. You didn't quote anything I wrote. > In the field I decided to cover, I took another approach: packaging A > but not B biases the competition towards A, although I do not feel able > to make a choice between A or B which would be logical and fair. It seems to me that Lucas is referring to situations where making a logical, fair choice between A and B is easy (because the only salient difference is that one "is of less good quality than the other"). In situations like that, sure, don't package the poorer-quality or less-maintained one. [I am not suggesting packaging everything that goes by on freshmeat.net.] In cases where it's less clear cut, though, I'm with you: package them all. Of course, part of why it's so nice that "apt-get install WHATEVER" almost always works is that the end-user can trust that WHATEVER, once installed, will itself work. If there's not enough manpower to make that true, it shouldn't be packaged. But this brings us full circle: let's have more DDs, I say, so that there can be more packages and still keep up the quality. zw -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]