* Colin Watson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) spake thusly: > On Sat, Feb 16, 2002 at 12:51:48PM -0600, Dimitri Maziuk wrote: > > As far as I can tell the bug is between maintainer's chair and > > keyboard. I don't see how filing a bug against $PACKAGE will fix > > that, I fully expect that bug to be marked "wontfix". Ridiculing > > the guy in public, OTOH, might work. > > You are on crack. The maintainer's bug report against debhelper > explicitly said that he didn't like the dependency on xutils.
I'm on pot actually. I'm whining about a general QA problem of which bitchx/debhelper is just a particular example. It's not that hard to do something stupid at 4am when you've just spent 8 hours trying to work around a bug in (let's say, for example) debhelper; one should stop and think for a moment before uploading (just like one should stop and read the command before pressing Enter, it may read "rm -rf / stuff" instead of "rm -rf /stuff"). Otherwise you may end up doing something plainly ridiculous, like making a command-line irc client depend on half the X Window System. (And that may well be acceptable at times, e.g. when you're uploading a critical security fix. But in many cases it may be better to *not* upload the package until the bug in $foo is fixed). This is not a bug in a particular package, it's the maintainer losing sight of -- whatever you'd call it, big picture, common sense... I also claim that it's just a matter of time before someone makes their $foo depend on $bar because they [don't have time|can't be bothered] to create a separate $libfoobar0g package with one shared library in it. With similar results (or worse). Ask Murphy if don't believe me. And "it's unstable" is not a very good excuse for not thinking. Dima -- Q276304 - Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords -- RISKS 21.37
