Hi,
On Thu, 30 Aug 2001, A Mennucc1 wrote:
[...]
> -----why is the 'win' port important?
[...]
(Sorry for dropping in late to this thread, I was too busy lately to
follow debian-devel tightly.)
The social contract says "Our Priorities are Our Users and Free Software".
Such a win-port might indeed serve some users. But for my own part, I do
have some personal problems with making all free software win-compatible.
Does it serve Free Software? Such ports frequently lead to crippled
design [1] and frankly, I do not like to give people more excuses for not
switching to an entirely free OS.
The one argument I am missing from the discussion is this: The porters
find some problem with package foo and file a bugreport (most probably
critical) to the maintainer of foo who has to look into the problem,
withdrawing time for more important things than a weird port. It has
happened before [2] and it will happen again. We really shouldn't invite
everything into Debian. It will distract us from providing a really
useful free OS.
For my own part, the mere thought of receiving reports like "package bar
doesn't build on win" gives me the creeps. I would have to log in to one
of those crippled machines, try to fix scripts, makefiles, code, whatnot.
Ugh.
Instead, I would consider downgrading the bugreport to wishlist/wontfix.
Regards
-richy.
[1] Why does Apache have to abstract away their threads? Right, because
Winsux doesn't have pthreads. Admittedly, this might be a little
off-topic because that is for a native port, but that's the basic
pattern.
[2] Look at the parisc port: GCC-3.0 is not even officially supported
upstream and the entire toolchain seems to be changing frequently.
Some packages build one day but not the next. I wonder how they
want to release that stuff.
--
.''`. Richard B. Kreckel
: :' : <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
`. `' <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
`- <http://www.ginac.de/~kreckel/>
