* Ben Hutchings [Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:10:21 +0000]:
> On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 04:42:19PM +0100, Sylvain Rochet wrote:
> > Hi,
> > On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 02:02:08AM -0600, William Pitcock wrote:
> > > What does this have over PowerDNS?
> > Probably nothing, else that I am using it and packaging it for my own
> > and thought that it would be a good idea to contribute to Debian, is
> > redundancy a problem ?
> Even if you're a perfectly responsible maintainer, a new package still
> requires some work by ftpmaster, the release team, possibly the security team,
> and so on. It also increases the number of options a user has to choose
> between. If the package is redundant, this is a waste of their time.
This is true. However, while increasing the number of options a user has
to choose from is a drawback, it's at the same time a benefit.
Figuring out which software you want to use for a particular purpose is
painful, because all suck in their own ways and you need to find the one
that sucks less for you. And when you find it without having to get
outside of your distribution's pool, you'll be thankful that somebody
made that happen.
Sadly, I don't think the decision of deciding which ones will suck less
for users can be outsourced to the maintainers, at least not in an
unopinionated distribution. Which is of course quite different from
saying that we should not be setting a minimum quality bar for all
packages, I'm all for that (but how?). So, if mydns is a reasonably fine
piece of software, I see no reason why we shouldn't include it. We need
less crap in the archive, not less good software as well.¹
Encouraging upstreams to work together is fine, but in practice very
seldom will yield results, so I don't have anything against it being
done, but I don't think it should be a substitute for packaging the
software.
(¹) I realize mydns could be complete crap, but the argument still
holds.
My off-the-top-of-my-heart 2¢,
--
Adeodato Simó dato at net.com.org.es
Debian Developer adeodato at debian.org
A hacker does for love what other would not do for money.
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