Re: DEBIAN POLICY WEEKLY, #4 (October 23, 1997)

[Christian Schwarz <schwarz@monet.m.isar.de>]

On Fri, 24 Oct 1997, Marco d'Itri wrote:

> [Please Cc all replies.]
> On Oct 23, Christian Schwarz <schwarz@monet.m.isar.de> wrote:
> 
>  >I suggest to change policy so that every Debian package has to use
>  >liblockdev to lock/unlock devices.
> We should not force to modify all packages, not every maintainer is a C
> programmer who knows how to modify the source.

I disagree here. One major reasons why our distribution has a high quality
is that we adapt (i.e. hack :) all our programs to work together well.
Sometimes it's necessary to modify the C source code, for example, to make
all e-mail servers/clients use the same locking mechanism.

If a maintainer is not a C programmer, he/she should probably pass the
package to someone else and adopt a package which does not require C
knowledge.


Thanks,

Chris

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