On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 5:40 AM, Nate Duehr <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It is very common for software developers to plow ahead without thinking > much about the versions the distros provide. > > You may want to contact them and see how they would expect users to use > their software effectively. > > It's likely: They won't care.
I think that in may cases, this is an unfair characterisation. I'm biased though, I'm an upstream maintainer. I hardly ever hear from the distributions, despite the fact that the software I maintain is installed on over 99% of Linux machines (according to Debian popcon, about 99.8%). The sole exception is Debian (hi, Andreas!). I'm pretty sure the reason here is, once again, manpower. The distibutions include thousands of packages and so the staff who are paid to look after the distribution hardly have any time at all to interact with the upstream comunities, at least on average. The distributions need to figure out where to spend their staff time, and it unsurprisingly most of it goes on high-priority things like glibc, Apache, and the kernel, as you say. Regarding documentation though, I guess the situation is easier in my case; all the documentation that is available for findutils ships in the source tarball, so users always have access to a full set of documentation relevant to the software they are using (they may need to install a separate -doc package, but that's a whole other flamewar). James. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]