On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 08:15:22PM +0100, Carsten Hey wrote: > James Vega seems to be the most active devscripts maintainer these days, > and he does this (as far as I know) in his spare time. If he does not > want to have python scripts in it, I see no justification to force him > to do so. I also see no reason to try hard to convince him after he > clearly stated his point of view.
First of all, I'm not sure anymore that I see the point of discussing
the *language issue* in a circle larger than the devscripts maintainers.
(Disclaimer: although I'm still listed as devscripts uploader, I
consider myself in violation of that rule as wall: it's been quite a
while since my last significant contribution to the package.) The
language issue should probably be a decision within the devscripts team,
together with the script proposers.
Nevertheless, I think the argument you're proposing above is potentially
dangerous. You seem to assume that just because some new scripts get
into devscripts then it will be up to the most active maintainer of the
package to maintain them. That is not my experience with devscripts
maintenance. I got in initially because of one single script, but later
on I also ended up fixing issues here and there and doing general clean
up work (for a very little while). I don't think that the fact I got in
due to a single script has increases the maintenance burden on other
maintainers. If it were the case, you might have been right, but I see
no evidence of that.
> If including other languages in the new package would be planned, naming
> it devscripts-extra or similar instead could be helpful. An alternative
> to the above is to rename devscripts to devscripts-base or -core, name
> the new binary package devscripts and let it depend on devscripts-base.
IMHO, part of the value of devscripts is that it offers a bunch of
useful maintenance script by default. It's already quite big and very
few maintainers know all of them. Splitting the package even more will
further reduce the possibility that maintainers will find them.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Quando anche i santi ti voltano le spalle, | . |. I've fans everywhere
ti resta John Fante -- V. Capossela .......| ..: |.......... -- C. Adams
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
