On Tue, Jan 23, 2001 at 12:07:02PM +0100, Tollef Fog Heen wrote: > * Matt Zimmerman > > | On Mon, Jan 22, 2001 at 09:38:15AM +0100, Christian Hammers wrote: > | > | > On Mon, Jan 22, 2001 at 08:13:57AM +0100, Martin Schulze wrote: > | > > You should always be able to backport a patch. If not, I'm sorry, but > that > | > > this should be one quality of a Debian maintainer, you lack something... > | > Martin? It it the quality of a Debian maintainer to find the right > line(s) in > | > a 100k C/C++ patch and moreover feeling sure enough about it to say that > this > | > fixes the security hole in one often used package?!?!?! Programming did > not > | > fall under the requirements of a maintainer, last time I checked. > | > | If a maintainer cannot program in the language in which her package is > written, > | how will she fix bugs, test patches, and generally understand how the > packaged > | software works on the inside? Such a maintainer is not a very effective > one. > > So, for instance, the maintainer of postgresql must know perl, tcl, C, > C++, python and java/jdbc very well? ( since it is written in C, and > has interfaces for all the programming languages mentioned.)
Not necessarily. The core of the code is written in C, and the maintainer should be able to read and write C comfortably in order to effectively maintain the package. The interfaces for other languages are generally small bits of glue that don't have very many bugs and don't change very often. I maintain rrdtool, which has a Tcl interface, but I've never written in Tcl in my life, except for a few expect scripts. I've also never gotten a bug report about the Tcl interface, had to apply a patch to it, or otherwise had to deal with Tcl. Note that the Tcl module, like the rest of rrdtool, is written in C. I might be a better maintainer if I knew Tcl, but so far, I have had no reason to do so. In the event that a problem arises with the Tcl bits, I imagine I could post a message here or elsewhere and ask for help. If I needed to do this every time a change was necessary in a C source file in one of my packages, my progress would be very slow indeed. > Of course, having an understanding of the programming languages is > helpful, but IMHO not required in order to be a maintainer. I would say that an understanding of the primary language of your package is required in order to be a good maintainer. Debugging is a big part of being a maintainer, and effective debugging requires programming knowledge. For example, I would not adopt or package a Python or Tcl program, as I'm not comfortable patching and debugging in those languages. -- - mdz
