I suppose that many of you have seen the message below posted elsewhere, but I think that the discussion fits perfectly in debian-devel and debian-emacsen.
This message was preceeded by criticisms to Debian (not to say bashing) coming from XEmacs developers at the gnu.emacs.gnus newsgroup in a thread started with Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. -- Rafael Laboissiere ------- Start of forwarded message ------- From: Per Abrahamsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss,gnu.emacs.gnus Subject: Free software: Packagers vs Developers Followup-To: gnu.misc.discuss Date: 01 Jul 1999 19:03:38 +0200 Organization: The Church of Emacs Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [ FUT: gnu.misc.discuss ] The specific issue is that Debian is distributing an alpha version of Gnus as the default Gnus for XEmacs on their unstable branch. There are two problems with this: 1. Alpha releases aren't intended for anyone but developers, and those users determined enough to subscribe to the developers list, and download and install it themselves. While most projects have adopted a policy which makes it easy to join as an alpha tester, this should _not_ be thought of as a permission for outsiders to package and distribute the software more widely. All that will accomplish is to make developers more wary of making alpha releases, and maybe go back to a more closed development model. 2. Gnus is a part of both Emacs and XEmacs, and has been tested to work together with the other Emacs Lisp packages bundled with each Emacs or XEmacs release. By replacing one part of XEmacs with another, they are distributing something different from what the XEmacs team released. This means that it hasn't been tested by the XEmacs team to work together, and worse, bug reports reaching the XEmacs team no longer correspond to something they have released. Both problems are generic, people packaging and distributing alpha software, and people packaging and distributing their own "improved" versions of free software. All the major Linux distributions does it, perhaps to gain a competitive advantage, but Debian seems to be worse than the rest. Perhaps because they have so many package maintainers (500+), each of whom feel the need to make a difference. The responses we got on the gnus group from the packagers was: a) It is legal, so you have no right to complain. b) _We_ test the code, so _we_ know when it is ready. c) Our users demands it. None of which really helps solve the problem. I know that we developers have to live with _some_ changes being made in order for the software to work together in a distribution, but it would be nice if some ethical guidelines among packagers could be developed to supplement the current Debian rules, like: 1) _Never_ distribute alpha releases. 2) _Never_ distribute improved versions. 3) _Never_ distribute with different "user preference" options than the default. 4) Keep bug fixes and interoperability changes to an absolute minimum. While this may make the individual distribution "worse" on the short term, having the code released by the developers being as close as possible to the code used by the users should improve the quality of the feedback from users to developers, and improve the quality of the code for everybody on a slightly longer term. On the long term, I could see developers themselves create packages for the hypothetical dominating platform (say LSB) using the hypothetical dominating package format. With the right software and the right standards, it would just be another Makefile target. Distributors would then collect the already made packages, and we would avoid the middlemen in most cases. ------- End of forwarded message -------
