Dependencies in the PPA for Jaunty

[Ben Finney]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> writes:

> Maritza Mendez writes:
>  > deps could be a full-time job. Bzr is much more manageable because
>  > bzr plugins are good for exactly one thing: bzr. I don't see
>  > keeping track of bzr plugins as being all that hard.
> 
> Of course it's not.  That is a technical problem and one that the
> distros have already solved satisfactorily.

I suspect I've recently been bitten by this, but it's hard to tell
(Debian bug#532947 <URL:http://bugs.debian.org/532947>.)

> As you say,
> 
>  > The real issue -- as others have pointed out -- is how to balance
>  > innovation in the developer community with reliability in the user
>  > community. That's a social question, not a technical question.
> 
> I don't see how this is different from the problem that Linux distros
> must solve, except in scale.

Right. Evolving an API such that published interfaces continue to be
supported, and don't go away without a good deprecation path, is
essential — even (especially?) for plug-ins that are managed by the
same people working on the core.

That doesn't seem to be something for *downstream* packagers to solve at
all; it's only really tractable by supporting published APIs and only
ever deprecating them slowly and gracefully.

-- 
 \       “Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have |
  `\    to murder a loved one because they're the devil.” —Emo Philips |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney