[Motu-reviewers] [REVU][COMMENT] for emacs-nxml-mode

[Stefan Potyra]

Hi Marcin, 

first of all, I'm sorry for not giving a more detailed answer on revu; as I 
stated I was in a hurry and simply had no time to do so.

Am Montag 27 Februar 2006 22:30 schrieb motu-reviewers at lists.tauware.de:
> Comment for package emacs-nxml-mode (not advocating)
> Number of Advocates: 0
> Packages was uploaded at: 2006-02-26 20:40:01.956955
> Package was uploaded from: marcin.antczak at gmail.com
> REVU-Link: http://revu.tauware.de/details.py?upid=2067
>
> marcin.antczak at gmail.com wrote:
>
> It's pretty hard to be well motivated when someone tells you that your work
> is not is worth nothing because it makes you do something...

Please don't believe that your contribution is worth nothing.

>
> All I do is offer you my contribution to change ubuntu into something
> better.
>
> Well organized, user friendly and consistent.
>
> And personally I don't care about debian.  

If you don't want to give back change or file bugs to debians BTS, that's one 
thing. 
But we still need to stick to the debian policy, and thus to the debian emacs 
policy as well. (I didn't read it yet, maybe there isn't even s.th. about 
package naming in there.)

> I created package for ubuntu and 
> I could maintain this.
>
> Package is ready, it works all right and lintian is also happy about this
> package.
>
> So all you need to do is just to replace nxml-mode with emacs-nxml-mode if
> you want.

The point in there is *replacing* the package. It is not an option to add a 
second sourcepackage which contains an already present source to the archive. 
In the worst case we'd end up having to fix two packages instead of one.

The naming of a sourcepackage should usually be the same as the upstream name. 
So nxml-mode is imo the right choice here. It doesn't need to be the same as 
the *binary* name though (which then could be emacs-nxml-mode). 

Using the existing sourcepackage (or overriding the existing sourcepackage 
with your sourcepackage) will simplify packaging a great way. Otherwise (in 
case both sourcepackages contain the same files) both needed to be adjusted 
to mutually conflict each other and thus will provide extra work for the next 
merge-time (since we need to adjust the debian-package nxml-mode during every 
upcoming merge).

>
> And another thing is that this package doesn't need to be changed very
> often while as you could see - last version of nxml-mode is more than 1
> year old. So as I said I could maintain this.

And you'll need to maintain it (forever).

My suggestion, to contact the debian emacs-folks is still true. If you think 
the naming scheme is particularly evil, it might be a good thing to have it 
fixed where the error occured. Thus we could go back in sync with debian, 
w.o. having to care for yet another package during the merges. (IIRC, we were 
out of sync with debian for dapper with about 900 sourcepackages - many of 
them unneeded - and it really cost us much time).
If there are other issues apart from the naming, and the debian maintainer or 
ppl. from debian-emacsen don't care about it, it's still an option to 
override the emacs-related packages.

However, that's just a *suggestion* I made, and you're not bound to it.

Hope that makes my comment a little bit clearer,
	Stefan.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 191 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-motu/attachments/20060228/03f8bc0d/attachment.pgp