Stefano Zacchiroli schrieb am Monday, den 28. November 2011: > On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 12:54:57PM +0100, Alexander Wirt wrote: > > Its simple and things like dpatch-edit-patch are just great. I now use > > dpatch > > for round 8 years and it worked every time. I don't see any reason to move > > away. > > > > And I still like the "never touch a running system" approach. If dpatch > > works > > without problems, why deprecate it? > > Well, there is also the cost of diversity to take into account. I don't > doubt that for you, right now, dpatch is better than quilt. You are used > to it and you're happy with it. But in a project as large as Debian > diversity has a cost. > > Think about learning packaging (which is an important use case, given > that we often lament we don't have enough people power in Debian). The > cost of package learning is proportional to the number of tools > involved. Multiplicating the number of tools that do the same thing adds > up to that number, for anyone who has to deal with packages maintained > by diverse teams with potentially different habits. > > To name another use case, we have learned in the past release cycles > that the only way to keep up with Debian releases is to have a > significant number of people that do NMUs. Given that we need those > people, we should also try to apply a principle of least surprise from > one package to another. For the Squeeze release I've NMU-ed packages > maintained in yada. Not. Fun. > > The maintainer surely had the right to maintain them in yada, but that > choice induced a cost on the release cycle of others who had to learn > yada in the unfortunate case the maintainers stopped doing her job > properly. > > We have a tradition in Debian on standardizing on interfaces, which is > good. But also standardizing on tools has value, because it reduces the > cost of diversity throughout the archive. If standardizing on tools is > considered to be too much, we should at least encourage uniformity. > That, I believe, is what Gergely is doing, and I applaud the effort. The question is: who decides? I have a bunch of packages and an established workflow that served me well over the last years. I don't want to learn another *censored* system, just because someone said its the new standard or it is better. I can't remember that somebody asked about deprecating well established and working tools.
Alex -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20111128224143.ga3...@smithers.snow-crash.org
