pan pan pan

[Rupert Swarbrick]

Peter Van Eynde <pvaneynd at debian.org>
writes:

>> I will be there and can try to stir some thing up if need be. 
>> 
>> Also, I would be willing to help out with packages (though I am not
>> currently a Debian Developer).
>
> Honestly I get the impression that few people care about the packages.
> Most implementations ask to recompile from source when people report bugs...
>
> But feel free to discuss this ;-)
>

Well, does that mean that the solution is more frequent package updates?
I'm not trying to be unreasonable here, but it seems that many of the CL
libraries I use don't have proper "release procedures" and instead have
more or less frequently updated git/darcs repositories.

I don't think that debian packages are a waste of time. On the contrary,
I spent flipping ages trying to work out how to get a newer version of
clsql working a couple of weeks ago. At first, there was a problem with
not having a new enough cffi and then there was a different problem with
an incompatible version of libmysqlclient... "Known working"
combinations, which can be ensured using debian's package systems, would
have saved me several hours...

Of course, this might be quite a bit of work. I'm currently using
cl-soap, parenscript, stumpwm and several other libraries you're
packaging. Would it be helpful for me (and others!) to do stuff like
preparing new versions of the packages based on recentish stableish git
trees and the like?

We're never going to change the fact that upstream, when faced with a
bug, asks people whether it's still present in the latest version from
the repository. That's clearly going to happen with any program or
library in any language.

But it would be satisfying if it were possible to ensure that the advice
for someone wanting to use a library on debian started with "apt-get"
rather than "git clone"!

Rupert
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