On Sun, 12 Jun 2011 12:07:46 +0200 Ted Dunning <ted.dunn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> There has been a bit of talk about Apache Zookeeper recently by Thomas > Koch. For the benefit of the list, I suspect this is #602694 which is at least partly a personal thing for the current Debian maintainer. Debian, in general, cares more about #626020. > He has a bad opinion of > Zookeeper and things it is "not good enough for Debian". Irrespective of disagreements with the current maintainer, zookeeper is not good enough for Debian stable simply because it has a separate release-critical bug. #626020 - FTBFS on mips. There is no argument about this - failing to build from source on a supported architecture means, by definition, that the software is not of sufficient quality for Debian. End of. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=626020 That one bug is sufficient reason for zookeeper to be excluded from the next stable release. It's sufficiently bad that if it is left unfixed when the release freeze starts, there would be a justifiable reason for removing zookeeper from testing as well as preventing it getting into a stable release. At that point, it's probably worth removing it from unstable too. Release critical bugs *matter*. There are different ways of handling this but handled it must be or zookeeper in Debian will be history. > goal. The primary goal is highly > reliable software that can be maintained and which has a living > community around it. Zookeeper has > achieved all three of these. ... so the community need to see what can be done to fix the RC bug. If the current maintainer isn't happy with the package then someone else needs to step up or someone like me will seek the removal of the package instead. > Suffice it to say that ZK is widely adopted by both sophisticated and > unsophisticated users with > really excellent operational experience. From the admin point of > view, it is some of the most > reliable and high quality code around. Thomas: are you going to continue maintaining zookeeper or has your usage of it changed such that it would be better to orphan it in Debian? (If so, a wnpp O: bug would be useful.) > That leaves the question of internal code quality which is that Thomas > has focussed on in his critiques. Internal code quality would be at issue with the current FTBFS bug, yes. > So we have some interesting evidence here. It can be hard to debug arch-specific bugs but that is about working with the Debian maintainer and the mips team to debug it. There's no room for discussion here. Fix the bug or the package will eventually be removed because it will, by definition, not be good enough for Debian. > On one side, automated tools quibble with the style of the code in ZK > and Thomas finds the code design > distasteful. That's been sufficient reason in the past for me to get packages removed from Debian. It depends on the likelihood of RC bugs arising from design problems, upstream reactions and whether someone in Debian volunteers to do the Debian side of the work. > In contrast, however, the code as it stands is very well tested, is > extraordinarily stable and by actual demonstration > is maintainable and modifiable by new contributors. > > As such, I would disagree strongly with the statement that ZK is not > of sufficient quality to be included in Debian. The RC bug argues differently and, in Debian, the RC bug is always more persuasive than protests from interested parties who lack the time or motivation to actually fix the problem. > Thomas may not want to maintain the Debian packaging, but hopefully > others will. I hope that Thomas' negative > comments do not discourage others from investigating Zookeeper and > drawing their own conclusions. If someone does not step up to do the work (in say about a month or two because we're quite a way from the release currently), then I'll seek the removal of zookeeper from testing and unstable as a fix for the RC bug myself. Forewarned is forearmed etc. Thanks for putting zookeeper on my radar - I'll be watching it a lot more closely now and I'll be in touch if it gets to be removed. I've no interest in zookeeper in and of itself, I just care about quality assurance in Debian. A new twist on The Streisand Effect, you might say. ;-) -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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