Request to remove "winesetuptk" package from universe

[Scott Ritchie]

On Sat, 2005-03-12 at 01:32 +0100, Oliver Grawert wrote:
> hi,
> Am Freitag, den 11.03.2005, 15:55 -0800 schrieb Scott Ritchie:
> > On that note, I really, really want to know exactly why they're still
> > not in universe.  They're more current, I can actively test them, and
> > they don't confuse users by having only a partial and broken Wine
> > install.  I still haven't gotten a straight answer from anyone other
> > than "you're not the Debian maintainer"
> i and several others answered this question several times via mail and
> on irc now, we also asked you several times to work together with the
> debian maintainer, since we dont want step away from the debian
> packages. you still havent solved the issue with the several libwine-xxx
> packages i asked you about several times. and no, the answer never was 
> "you're not the Debian maintainer", the answer always was "please work
> together with him to make sure the packaging is compatible between
> debian and ubuntu". if i remember correctly the debian maintainer also
> made a changelog entry in his package that he would consider use your
> work for the debian packages too. did you contact him ? do you work
> together now ?
> 

I'm sorry, I thought it was understood that the whole reason I started
on this venture was because the Debian maintainer was simply unavailable
and unresponsive.  He didn't return any mails of mine, didn't respond to
requests to keep things current, and the packages were regularly 3 or 4
months out of date - ancient, by Wine standards.  That's when I started
making my packages and putting them up at winehq, and I only did it
because the Debian ones were 1) broken and split needlessly to the
confusion of users and 2) hopelessly out of date.  It got quite
ridiculous telling users who came with support requests "oh, you're a
debian user - install from source instead"  It's a little better now,
since we can point Ubuntu users to the packages at WineHQ, but that's
not an optimal solution and I believe we all know it.

Despite my willingness to take over, make working packages, maintain
them, test them, and interact with users and the Wine developers, the
Debian maintainer kept his iron hand on them.  Maybe it's about ego, or
mistrust of me, or perhaps a conflict of interest (the Debian maintainer
does work for Transgaming, Wine's chief proprietary competitor), I don't
know, but whatever his reasons are for acting this way seems to have
little to do with creating great software.  Maybe I can guilt him into
retiring, but it's just not the best way to go about things.

I got really excited about the Ubuntu way when Jeff Waugh recruited me
and Matt Zimmerman told me that things like that wouldn't happen in the
Ubuntu universe, since we don't block other people's work like that.  I
even got a personal message from Mark Shuttleworth telling me how
excited he was about getting first class wine support in Ubuntu.  There
are many great things we should take from Debian and contribute back,
but the ability of maintainers to keep an iron lock on packages which
they refuse to update or support should not be one of them.

I don't mean to start a conflict with anyone here, or to drive a wedge
between Ubuntu and Debian, but if I have to jump through hoops just to
get a less ancient version of Wine added to universe, it's going to be
needlessly hard for me to contribute to Ubuntu.  I've already spent
about 40 hours just trying to weed through Debian beaurocracy (whose
proposed solution was to submit about 100 bug reports on things I've
already fixed so the Debian maintainer might feel inclined to do
something).

> 
> > I'd like to maintain them personally.  I even got approved as an MOTU
> > back in the days of yore, 
> to my knowledge (and i should know since i'm in the MOTU lead team that
> does the approval) you havent been approved as a MOTU. could you please
> tell who reviewed which packages of you to do this approval ?
> 
> ciao
> 	oli
> 

Perhaps I'm just confused or misinterpreting things.  Either way, there
is no need for this to be difficult.  The packages upgrade cleanly from
Debian or Ubuntu universe to the ones at WineHQ, and the ones at WineHQ
are going to be current and great as long as I'm on the task.

The WineHQ packages really are better, even from a common user's
perspective.  Take a look at this news article, where the author went
through the same process that most of our Debian and Ubuntu users go
through with Wine (unless they give up in frustration)
http://software.newsforge.com/software/05/03/02/1449240.shtml?tid=130

There's no reason for this - he should have been able to get the right
packages straight out of universe.  But that's not happening right now,
and telling me to work with the Debian maintainer (who has turned down
my requests to do so) isn't going to change that.

I feel really bad about the kind of conflict such a simple thing like
this is creating, but I also feel really excited - there's no need for
it, and the spirit of Ubuntu really can help guide us here with the
proper way forward.  I look forward to the day when we can run good Wine
packages cleanly in Ubuntu, whether I am the "owner" of them or not.

Sincerely,
Scott Ritchie