[Distutils] formencode as .egg in Debian ??

[Josselin Mouette]

Le jeudi 24 novembre 2005 à 12:49 -0500, Phillip J. Eby a écrit :
> I don't really care if you accept the proposals or not; you guys need to do 
> whatever you think is best for Debian.  I've only tried to educate you 
> about your options regarding eggs, framed within the assumption that you 
> *want* to distribute egg-based projects.  The question of eggs' goodness or 
> lack thereof is entirely irrelevant within that frame.  Either you want to 
> distribute those projects or you don't.  If you don't, then this discussion 
> is pointless.  If you do, then arguing that people shouldn't use eggs is 
> equally pointless.  The only discussion that has any point is *how* we can 
> get the needs of both Debian and the project developers met.

Indeed. I'm sure no sane Debian developer would want to distribute
egg-based projects if there was another way to distribute them, but they
are here and people will want them. You are making things worse by
advocating the egg way of doing things, and the only thing I can do if
you don't stop is to urge developers to think twice before shipping
their projects this way. Maybe it will make their development a bit more
difficult, but it will improve the situation for their users.

> Bluntly put, it's Debian that's asking me to change my practices (and those 
> of egg-based project authors) to suit their needs, not the other way 
> around.  You seem to be under some delusion that we need you or want you to 
> support those projects, when it's actually the existence of eggs that 
> allows us to not care whether *you* exist.  We wouldn't be having this 
> discussion if somebody from your group hadn't asked for *our* help, so that 
> Debian can play in *our* sandbox.  All this discussion about the relative 
> elegance of different packaging mechanisms is irrelevant.

It seems that you can only think about things in a competitive way. "Use
our stuff or die.", or "Change your way of doing things or you'll die.".
Looks like I mistakenly hoped it was possible to change things on
technical grounds, but if you're rebutting any technical discussion as
"irrelevant", there's probably not much to do.

I know what will happen now: people will package your crappy eggs,
because users want the software that's inside. Packages will be crappy
and users will complain, and you'll tell them their distribution sucks.
And what do we get? Nothing interesting. If you don't want to do
anything for users, it's pointless to try to discuss with you.

My tone is aggressive because it's easy to feel irritated by so much
foolishness, but on the grounds, this is still a request: please, change
your distribution system so that it's possible to distribute your
software in a sane way. Don't become like Mozilla. You can't imagine how
much Debian time is wasted because Mozilla developers don't care about
the Unix way of doing things. We are receiving weekly complaints of
users about the quality of mozilla packages, and there's nothing we can
do for them. Don't make python-related Debian maintainership look the
same.

Regards,
-- 
 .''`.           Josselin Mouette        /\./\
: :' :           josselin.mouette at ens-lyon.org
`. `'                        joss at debian.org
  `-  Debian GNU/Linux -- The power of freedom
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