pyjamas (and dependent) packaging: examples of failure of ubuntu packaging and development process

Philip Hands phil at hands.com
Sun Jul 4 12:46:36 BST 2010


Oh Dear, Luke,

Perhaps if you asked for what you wanted, rather than starting with an
unfocused rant about what's wrong with the world, you'd get a slightly
better reaction from people.

As to the rest of you, please forgive Luke his first post in this
thread.  He's got Asperger's, which may or may not have anything to do
with his tendency to piss everyone in his audience off first, and then
make a reasonable request after they've all stopped listening.

I'll attempt to translate...

I think what Luke's really upset about is that one of the binary
packages (pyjamas-desktop) generated from the pyjamas source has
unsatisfied dependencies as a result of xulrunner version skew between
Ubuntu and Debian.  As a result all of pyjamas has been kicked out of
Ubuntu, which is a shame.  Especially since pyjamas-desktop is not the
bit of pyjamas that most of its users care about.

Given that it's a quilt based package, perhaps Ubuntu could have an
Ubuntu specific patch that (as a temporary fix) would prevent the
building of pyjamas-desktop, thus allowing the rest of the package to be
built. Simply removing the section of debian/control relating to
pyjamas-desktop would presumably do the trick.

Perhaps this approach could be made into some sort of policy?  So that
in future when there are dependency issues with largely optional binary
packages, they get individually dropped, rather than dropping the entire
source package.

As for all the other points Luke made about how to fix the universe,
well they're not going to happen, especially if prefixed with "you're
all idiots because ..." so I'll not waste everyone's time discussing
their merits or otherwise.

Luke, you should probably report each of the other points as bugs
(without any of the emotionally charged language) against each of the
packages involved (if you've not already done so) so that at least
something constructive might come out of that as well.

Cheers, Phil
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]    http://www.hands.com/
|-|  HANDS.COM Ltd.                    http://www.uk.debian.org/
|(|  10 Onslow Gardens, South Woodford, London  E18 1NE  ENGLAND
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