"Marcelo E. Magallon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Talk with the maintainer. Or NMU. Or make noise on -devel. > But don't "fork" packages.
I agree and disagree. Talking with the maintainer works sometimes. Sometimes one is in a position to NMU. Sometimes it helps to make noise on debian-devel. But sometimes there are fundamental disagreements about how something should be packaged and then it must be possible for two competing packages to exist in Debian between which users can make a choice; otherwise you are giving maintainers the same rights as software proprietors: _they_ control the code; _you_ can't change it (while remaining within the Debian framework) even if you are willing to do the work. I say you should _not_ give maintainers that kind of power -- the power to stop others from doing a better job. That kind of power will inevitably be abused, and has already been abused. Every maintainer should face the threat of competition from someone else who thinks he or she can do a better job. That is an essential freedom in open source development. There are already many programs in Debian that are packaged in different flavors. Most of these are upstream-stable and upstream-developmental variants. These variants serve the needs of different sorts of users. From reading this thread it is my impression that gqview falls into this group: the gqview maintainer has a conservative packaging policy while his critics want to run the latest version. Unless one side gives in, this seems like adequate grounds for a fork. -- Thomas Hood
