Re: why apt/dpkg not using bzip2
On Sun, Sep 10, 2000 at 06:55:54PM -0700, Joey Hess wrote:
> Ben Collins wrote:
> > > That kind of packaging is a hack, and a very user unfriendly one. I'd like
> > > to have native bzip support, to have a lftp.orig.bz2.
> >
> > lol, whoever said our source package format was user friendly to begin
> > with?
>
> It doesn't matter if it's user-friendly. The DBS package format is not
> developer-friendly.
But it's maintainer friendly, and that is far more useful for us to have
good packages.
> Debian source packages, have from time immemorial, been appropachable as
> normal code trees that you can edit just as you would any code tree. The
> DBS messes this whole concept up. Now you have to deal with patches
> manually, and you have to dig up some obscure commands to even get a
> source tree you can hack on.
>
> The fact that I can no longer pull the debian source to libc, and
> immediatly jump into the source code, makes debian that much less useful
> to me, means I'm that much likely to bother to use the source for libc,
> etc.
Agreed. However, this is a documentation issue and nothing else. Just
because you don't know how to use it, does not degenerate it's usefulness
to the people who do use it. NMU's are not as important as actual MU's,
and are less frequent aswell.
> > Your choice, your loss :) The format I use has saved my countless hours
> > and tons of headaches.
>
> FWIW, I have several times sat down to NMU one package or another (for
> various good reasons), discovered it used DBS, and decided my time wasn't
> worth it.
FWIW, before I started using a DBS based source format, I sat down many
times to try and upgrade my packages to new upstream source and was so
frustrated with forward porting patches that it sat for weeks or even
months at a time before I got enough time/energy to do so. Example:
getting openldap2 ready took all of 30 minutes. This included forward
porting each patch. With the old format, I would have either manually went
throught the diff.gz, or run the patch and went through each .rej. My time
was saved, which makes the package more up-to-date, better maintained, and
needs less attention.
Ben
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