Santiago Vila Doncel: > So if we have to admit bashisms in debian/rules, we are in fact saying > "Debian packages will always be for Debian/Linux distributions".
and later in another message > No, we are saying "If you want to port a single Debian package to some > system, you have to Debianize the system first". This is nonsense. No, it is not nonsense. What we are doing is system integration. That means taking a large amount of existing software and making it all work together. This is not a kind of work whose results can be broken up into pieces and used in isolation. In order to do system integration successfully we must define standards that our own components adhere to so that everything is compatible with the other parts of our system. There is no absolute requirement that anything we do be compatible with any particular thing in the rest of the world. The ability to change things to make them fit into our world, without necessarily regarding how the rest of the world do it, is _vital_: it gives us complete technical control over everything that is a bug in our system. If we change our goal and decide that we want to be compatible with non-Debian systems over which we have no control then there will be bugs which we cannot even in principle fix in the `right place' - we'll have to work around them instead. One of the best things about Debian is that it's mercifully free of such workarounds for braindamage, precisely because we are able and willing to fix bugs where they are. Ian.
