<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 3:32 PM, Benjamin Drung <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bdrung@ubuntu.com">bdrung@ubuntu.com</a>></span> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div><div class="h5">
<br>
</div></div>I have to admit that the barrier is high to get new packages into Ubuntu<br>
and that creating new packages is not the best way to start/learn<br>
packaging.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>It seems to be that folks manage to create a package but it's not good enough. Then a motu or someone looks at it and you basically get a human being standing in the shoes of lintian telling you to fix insanely nuanced things which turns people away. I think its a question that we need to answer with someone's practical experience or statistics: How far away from ready are these packages? How long would it take a motu to go the final distance? Apparently there is not an adequate reward system setup for the motu - they must not feel like adding this software to ubuntu is worth their time. This is a bug. The REVU system and the whole MOTU concept seems to be designed to solve this problem, but we forgot that they are human beings.. it does seem worth it to me though to get this software in.</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
There is one concern when uploading a new package: Who maintains the<br>
package afterwards? The (unwritten) rule (?) is that the person that did<br>
the initial packaging should take care of it. When there is no MOTU<br>
using the package and the initial packager disappears, then the package<br>
will probably get outdated and buggy. When the initial packagers get<br>
their packages into Debian, then they are the maintainers of the<br>
packages and they are responsible for them. Therefore it's not only a<br>
philosophy concern and not totally unreasonable.</blockquote><div><br></div><div>I think the most natural thing is that it is co-maintained by motu and the package submitter. Bugs relating to the packaging are handled by motu, bugs related to the software itself are handled by the developer. I think motu just has to ask the question, is there someone out there who cares about this piece of software and is going to make sure it is basically working and periodically updated and willing to fix bug reports? If so then it should be a candidate for inclusion in Ubuntu irregardless of Debian status or that developers ability to create a perfect package, whether that ability be due to knowledge or lack of investible time. </div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div class="im">
> After the package gets into Ubuntu almost all of the work is done for<br>
> the folks who are experts at porting Ubuntu packages back into Debian.<br>
<br>
</div>How many people working on that task and how many Ubuntu packages needs<br>
to be ported to Debian? Can we rely on the folks who port Ubuntu<br>
packages back into Debian or is this more only a wish?</blockquote><div><br></div><div>I don't know actually but I have heard that stuff is getting backported. There are tools that automatically do this. They can automatically figure out the right dependencies by basically running ldd on the libs and figuring out the right stuff. So I think this happens already semi-automatically at least.</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div class="im">
> It should not be the concern of people who write awesome software and<br>
> just want to make it available in the distribution they actually use.<br>
<br>
</div>I agree that people who write awesome software shouldn't be bothered<br>
with packaging and all the distribution's processes. In an ideal world<br>
there would be a packager that work closely with the upstream developer<br>
and do all the packaging.</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Yep! And since this is not a democracy I wonder who at Ubuntu has authorized the demise of the REVU system? Isn't it part of Canonical's Ubuntu vision and hasn't at least one paid employee been asked to do it? Wasn't that person supervised by someone and did they drop the ball? Not to point fingers I have no idea how those things work - I just think its an unfortunate thing.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Cheers,</div><div>Brian</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><font color="#888888">
--<br>
</font><div><div></div><div class="h5">Benjamin Drung<br>
Ubuntu Developer (<a href="http://www.ubuntu.com" target="_blank">www.ubuntu.com</a>) | Debian Maintainer (<a href="http://www.debian.org" target="_blank">www.debian.org</a>)<br>
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