Re: the Great X Reorganization, package splits, and renaming
On Mon, 25 Jan 1999, Branden Robinson wrote:
> You have yet to explain what will BREAK if people continue to use the old
> font packages. Not in the future, RIGHT NOW.
Oh, you have yet to explain why a clock bomb is *not* a bad thing.
"Surely, it will exploit, but not now" ;-)
> How will the upgraders be inconvenienced? Which of their programs will break? Tell me. If you can
> come up with something concrete, I'll yield with no further argument.
It's already broken, just that the break will only show the first time the
new packages become different in any way to the old ones.
In the clock bomb example, the clock bomb is *always* bad, not
only when it does explode.
Please, don't talk about "release notes". We have a very good packaging
system, there should not be "release notes" for the upgrade. We are aiming
at non-interactive installs and upgrades, but unfortunately your sense of
aesthetics (to rename a few packages) seems to be more important than
that.
> I'm not going to place your sense of packaging esthetics above my own.
Well, please note that it's you who started talking about aesthetics.
First, you said "I believe the new names are less cryptic".
This creates the problem of the upgrading process.
I propose a solution (which is the only *viable* solution, since we can't
guarantee that dpkg will be changed), and you say it's uglier than the
hell.
> [...]
> It would compound the error to reverse the name change.
>
> Package: xfntbase
> Provides: xfonts-base
> ?
>
> I think not.
At least this would be *much* better than the current state of things.
> Pretending the Great Reorg didn't happen isn't a viable strategy, either.
> [...]
Splitting a package is ok, as long as you preserve the functionality
of existing users, and this is already done.
Renaming packages gratuitously is not ok if it creates a problem for which
there is not a solution.
--
"4253e339c8453a56f6cf478d4911ef52" (a truly random sig)
Reply to: