On 20 May 2016 at 05:06, Neil Williams <codeh...@debian.org> wrote:
>> My claim, as I'll outline below, is, if the upstream wants to give the
>> user an up-to-date software package, and they have to teach them how
>> to add a new archive, they'll give them an archive *they control*,
>> because they're now on the hook for delivering through that channel.
>> Upstream wants to spend as little time as they can with this, so they
>> make it easy - they make a deb.
>
> Except in the case you describe below, that is not easy because
> the .deb becomes a chain of .debs to cover all the dependencies.
Vendors/upstreams can bundle all the things they need into a single
package - its against our norms here, but from a technical
perspective, it is very viable. We need to think about how other folk
perceive the trade-offs, not just how we would do it :).
...>> - Leaf package ${BAR} has a robust upstream community, where
>> releases are very well tested, with a mature stable/unstable release
>> cycle. Our stable release freeze was off by a few months, so we've
>> been shipping their 'oldstable' in our 'stable' for years. The
>> maintainers are annoyed we don't use the latest stable in our
>> stable.
>
> LEAF does the work of getting the dependencies in a fit state and then
> does the backport and tells users to use it.
>
> It's the same amount of work overall.
We're asking from from that upstream community to come to our
community and do that work; they may not be Debian maintainers, let
alone Debian developers - when we assess 'work', we need to consider
context switch costs, learning our tooling and facilities - and
multiply that by the number of distros they have significant numbers
of users on - RHEL/Suse/Debian/Ubuntu - the temptation to just bucket
that as 'rpm and deb' and do the work twice, then build two variants -
that must be pretty high IMO.
I realise that isn't the end of the discussion, but when we're looking
at how to bring folk over here to work on Debian, we need to think
about it from their perspective, not ours.
-Rob
