On Mon, 29 May 2000, Anthony Towns wrote: > On Sun, May 28, 2000 at 10:04:30AM -0700, Alan W. Irwin wrote: > [in response to Tobias Peters] > > > I can see why neither Debian nor KDE wants to change here, and it is also a > > practical impossibility for KDE. Unfortunately, that leads to the > > conclusion that Debian will never distribute the binary versions of either > > KDE-1 or KDE-2 except in the unlikely event that RMS changes his mind. This > > leads to your next point which I absolutely agree with. > > Or unless the Harmony project [2] succeeds to a similar degree that > lesstif has and KDE can happily link against it. Or, unless Troll Tech > folds and Qt becomes BSD licensed [3]. The latter's a particularly > unfortunate thing to have to hope for.
I agree, these are possibilities as well, but I don't think they will happen any time soon if at all. > > > One current problem for Debian (unlike rpm-based distributions) is it does > > not have a standard source-package format. > > Actually, it does. Debian packages are built from a combination of three > files: the pristine upstream source (.orig.tar.gz), the Debian specific > patch (.diff.gz), and the source control file (.dsc). `apt-get source > -b qmail' for example, will download the source for qmail, unpack it and > apply the Debian patches, and build it, assuming you have the appropriate > programs available and so forth. I think tar.gz, and patch files are great means of source distribution. But if you read further in what I said, I was referring instead to the debianized source tree not being standardized. I have a question into Joey Hess (from the same thread), and I hope his response will hopefully clarify this side issue. > > > I have hope on this issue because with the exception of one correspondent > > who made it clear that he was completely prejudiced against KDE in any form, > > the others seemed as reasonable as you on the issue of distributing KDE as > > source. > > Distributing packages as source isn't necessarily desirable: it requires > a full compilation environment on all machines, it gives newbies a lot > of options for errors (not having a proper compilation environment, > having extra libraries that need to be uninstalled while the package > is being compiled, having bits of the package silently not be built), > and it introduces a whole class of bugs that are difficult to duplicate > by the maintainer. > > Especially for a large, complex desktop system that caters specifically > for newbies and the non-technically inclined, it's far from an ideal > solution. Possibly. But these are all quality assurance issues that Debian has historically been excellent at solving. Thus, I think the advantages of source distribution (in general, not just for KDE) outweigh the disadvantages. Alan W. Irwin email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] phone: 250-727-2902 FAX: 250-721-7715 snail-mail: Dr. Alan W. Irwin Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria, P.O. Box 3055, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, V8W 3P6 __________________________ Linux-powered astrophysics __________________________
