Hi Niko, On Sun, 17 Oct 2010, Niko Tyni wrote:
> Leaving the general Debian bashing aside, I've done quite a bit of work > with the Debian smokeping packages and I'm sorry it didn't work for you. Please don't take my post as a reflection on you personally, I didn't mean to criticize you in any way. I know that you've done an enormous amount of work on this, and your efforts really are appreciated. When I installed Smokeping from the sources I had no problems. Or not those sorts of problems, anyway. :) > I'd love to see a new maintainer for the package ... The package has > been up for adoption since February, see http://bugs.debian.org/568742 At about the same time that I began to use Debian, in 2007, I joined several Debian-sepcific lists. I made serious attempts to improve the Debian documentation, some of which is even more out of date than many applications distributed with 'stable'. My reward was almost nothing but spam from the list servers. I suggested improvement to the list servers and was ignored. As far as I could tell, nobody on any of the Debian documentation lists was even the slightest bit interested in what I was trying to do (start at the beginning, to make sure that the installation documentation was up to date and correct; for example the man page for "sources.list", as of three weeks ago when I last checked, is dated 2004 and *still* talks about obsolete repositories which do not exist). Eventually I walked away from it, and as you've probably gathered the experience left a sour taste. I'm afraid while some of the more 'mainstream' packages like cups and lrpng need adoption then something like Smokeping, which by its nature is useful to just a minority of users, must expect to get in line. In my view, for some of the packages available from Debian it would be better if they did not offer them at all. It isn't hard to install a package from source, and if you can't even be sure the documentation was written in this century and for the installation that you're working on then it's very much easier to figure out what's going on if you've installed from source than if you've installed a Debianized package which doesn't work. At least you'll have a fighting chance of finding everything. I can't help thinking that it would also be much easier to keep a beginner-friendly guide to installation from source up to date than it is to play catch-up with patches. I suppose this is evidence of an incompatibility in philosophies. :) -- 73, Ged. _______________________________________________ smokeping-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.oetiker.ch/cgi-bin/listinfo/smokeping-users
