"Steven G. Johnson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On 18 Jan 2003, Adam DiCarlo wrote: > > But I do think this goes too far. There might be good reasons why the > > upstream maintainers or debian maintainers are unable to maintain a > > ported package -- notably, if the upstream were not willing to take > > patches for building in other architectures. > > In which case the build will fail on those architectures, but as was > pointed out earlier this will not keep the package out of testing/stable > if the package never built on those architectures, so what's the problem?
If neither the upstream maintainer(s) nor the debian developer is willing to maintain the port, you are proposing that the Debian developer ought to maintain the port. I think this is wrong in principle and wrong in fact. I think if the Debian pkg maintainer does want to maintain the port -- fine. If the package is really inherently portable, fine. But in the other case, it's really the maintainer's call to support the arch or not, I think. Take the example of a piece of software where certain core routines need to be written in assembler for the software to work. Assembly routines are only written for X86 and SUN4 CPUs. The Debian pkg should be available only for i386 and sparc in this case. Take the example of Java. Only certain arches are supported and provided by Blackdown. I think it makes sense if the Debian packages reflected that. Doing anything else is deliberately forcing buggy packages onto the overworked porters. > Labelling it correctly will make it easier to identify which packages > could use porting, If all they want is a list of packages in i386 and not in some other arch, there are better ways to get it. > keep people aware of build bugs, prod the packagers to > make at least a minimal effort at maintaining portability, etc., and > thereby make the porters' job easier. Sure, in the case you cited, it was just a build bug, fine, I agree. I'm just saying (again) that I thought your expansion went a little too far. I don't wnat to encourage Debian forking. > But I'll leave this for the Debian policy wonks to debate. Well, thankfully we're out of the realm of policy and into the realm of "best practices". -- ...Adam Di Carlo..<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...<URL:http://www.onshored.com/>
