Hi, On Fri, 11 Dec 1998, Martin Schulze wrote:
> some issues of your proposel are already working. Every package can have > a mailing list referenced through [EMAIL PROTECTED] This is already > working for over a year. Yes, I know. But part of my point was that the way it works now is a bit of a kludge. My proposal addresses more general issues and tries to come up with a more general approach incidentally offering solutions to some other (potential) problem areas. Please consider my proposal more for the bits about general package administration. IMHO having a better organised authoritative source for package -> maintainer information is a big win in itself. Generalising the notion of "package" creates many opportunities for structured communication. IMHO as debian expands, this is a nice thing to have. Also note that per my proposal, no complexity is added, but instead more symmetry is created. If dpkg can already handle virtual package (and it is indeed an improvement to the system) then why shouldn't the Debian organisation be able to handle virtual or "meta" packages? Notwithstanding my request for broader addressing of the matter, I'll still make some nitpicks about the current situation :-) > > Requirements: > > a) Use [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED] in the maintainer field > of package foo. That still leaves in the dependency on the physical maintainer. It also makes the information in the Packages file authoritative for the maintainer information. This is Bad for several reasons, only one of them being that the Packages file might be outdated. > b) Create a file .qmail-foo in your home directory on master. Albeit probably a nice feature of qmail, for our purposes it is a silly kludge if we depend on it for important parts of our communication infrastructure. > c) Put in addresses such as &[EMAIL PROTECTED]&[EMAIL PROTECTED] If [EMAIL PROTECTED] were a Real List, automatic (un)subscription would be possible and archiving would be a lot easier too. > PS: This is Qmail centric so should probably not be used if we ever > want to switch to another MTA. Some might consider that another reason indeed. Cheers, Joost
