stuck

[Loïc Minier]

On Tue, Sep 19, 2006, Martin Pitt wrote:
>                                                   I don't know which
> 'maintenance burden' Loic talks about, installing some files into
> package B instead of A is certainly not a burden.

 I talk about the fact that it will be harder to get dependencies right
 for new releases (or for new packages); we currently can rely on
 upstream information such as NEWS / README / INSTALL or
 configure.{in,ac} to find out which packages are needed.

 Take for example update-manager, which is said to currently only need
 the gconf module, and hence depends on python-gnome2, it could start
 requiring a new Python module from python-gnome2, say canvas, bonobo,
 or vfs.  How would we notice?  By grepping the sources on each new
 upstream release, grepping on the imports?  What if the import is
 conditionnal?
   Would we also need to install and test the application from a
 pbuilder to ensure all deps are present?  Should we test *all* features
 of the applications to make sure some part of the code is not doing an
 import which we missed?

 [ update-manager is not a terrific example, because it's developped by
 Ubuntu folks, and does not have an upstream website, upstream releases,
 configure.in checks, and tutti quanti; I suppose the packaging would be
 adapter immediately. ]


 Example of a split 1:  We're still at PyGtk 2.8.6 in Debian.  We don't
 have even have PyGobject.  The blame is probably on me, because I
 didn't have the time to test the upgrade path from the non-split
 version to the split layout and claimed it could cause issues.

 Example of a split 2: GNOME Python Extras was split recently in two,
 Desktop and Extras.  It took a month after the release of 2.14 for
 someone (me) to prepare the new source.  I didn't have the time until
 now to update dependencies of packages which depended on -extras before
 the split.  The split is not yet over since there's a build-dep loop,
 since one package never built on m68k, see:
 <http://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2006/07/threads.html#00036>


 Am I willing to allow more splits to happen when I can't even cope with
 the upstream splits?  No.

 I hope you see that there *is* a maintenance overhead.  Perhaps Ubuntu
 developers don't care of this maintenance overhead, it's nice they do
 have the time to maintain the splits.

-- 
Loïc Minier <lool at dooz.org>