New software created for Ubuntu

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 10:24:04AM +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> That is a fair remark. Still, I don't think you should assume that it is
> so on purpose or to make your life harder. I think the maintainers (and
> in most cases also "upstream" authors) of those softwares have thus far
> just assumed, in good faith, that there was no use of their software
> outside Debian, and that derivatives were just happy to use them
> unmodified. That is a possible explanation of why they are packaged as
> native Debian packages.
> 
> I'm convinced that if you approach the respective maintainers/authors
> explaining that there is interest in using the software outside Debian
> (or in a derivative which needs a bit more flexibility), they will be
> happy to consider packaging them as non-native Debian packages. In fact,
> as discussed in this thread, doing so can create further possibilities
> of distributions of that softwares and, as authors, I believe they will
> be happy about that.
> 
> Of course you should be ready to contribute patches in case there is
> something that need to be generalized a bit to ease usage in other
> contexts than Debian, but that's just usual upstream-downstream business
> (e.g. no different than what Debian does when a patch pushed upstream is
> considered by upstream "too-specific": we then need to sit down and
> generalize it, to the happiness of upstream).
> 
> In essence, have you tried proposing de-native-ization of the softwares
> you're concerned with?

Off-list, I contacted the folks who recently worked on merging these
packages, and the consensus view seems to be that it's not a problem that
these components are packaged natively.

-- 
 - mdz