[Mageia-dev] Minimal patching vs. fixing the whole Universe

Maarten Vanraes maarten.vanraes at gmail.com
Wed Jun 22 23:34:12 CEST 2011


Op woensdag 22 juni 2011 22:47:40 schreef Radu-Cristian FOTESCU:
> I would say that the general principle should be to apply a _minimal_
> patching, not to try to rewrite the work of the developers of hundreds of
> packages!
> 
> A distro's job is not to judge the work of the _upstream_ developers as
> long as this is not a real bug.
> 
> "Should" Mageia try to "fix" something that is not actually broken? There
> might be hundreds of packages with thousands and thousands of questionable
> decisions taken by the upstream developers -- however, why fixing
> something that works?
> 
> You see, I hate conflicts (although I seem to be a maestro in generating
> them), but I also need simplicity and clear policies. Also, policies that
> can be applied. "Perfect" policies that would require the revision of
> hundreds of packages that actually work are not my cup of tea.
> 
> Of course, I am _not_ a Mageia packager and this is not "my" package, but
> I'd like to know Mageia's policy wrt building packages. Normally, patches
> are not meant to optimize but to fix breakages. If the packagers are
> compelled to "improve" upstream's work, this can prove to be catastrophic
> in complex cases.
> 
> 
> Thank you,
> R-C aka beranger


imho, it's something like: "as long as you're patching it anyway, make it 
python and possibly add a conflicts with python >= 3.0" or something.

besides, by the time we'll actually have python3, it's likely that the 
upstream will already have been ported to python3... or the buildsystem would 
fail anyway...


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