Do we need an unofficial debian repository?

[Desmond O. Chang]

Hi Luca!

On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 03:33, Luca Capello <luca at pca.it> wrote:
> Hi there!
>
> Thanks to DebConf10, I am catching up with my huge mail backlog, which
> (obviously) includes pkg-common-lisp as well.
>
> On Mon, 2010-07-12 at 22:31 +0800, Desmond O. Chang wrote:
>> The team is inactive now.  People's bugreports and patches don't get
>> any response.  Many packages have been removed, many are out of date.
>> I think the slow and complicated uploading process is why the team
>> lacks contributors.
>
> I do not agree with your opinions, actually none of them.  There are
> different reasons for the old (current) situation.
>
> One of the major problem is that while in the past we had a team (sort
> of, Peter and me), later on both of us got busy in real life, which
> means that bugs/updates started to sum up.  Sure, there is no excuse for
> that, but hey, have I never said already that we are all volunteers?
>
> Another problem is the nature of Common Lisp software, similar to the
> scripting languages and not the compiled ones: as far as I could see
> (and frankly speaking I never was an heavy developer/user), no one cares
> about the distribution part, while on the contrary in most of the
> projects, if not every, people are advised to download the current
> snapshot and use that.  And no, this is not how Debian works, sorry.
>
> The team was founded exactly to solve both problems, and even more: we
> wanted to have a common place for Common Lisp stuffs (no pun intended)
> and a way to attract more people.  As far as I remember you, Desmond,
> were one of the few guys interested in join that effort: I have no
> problems in recognizing that unfortunately you were probably stopped by
> my lack of time, especially in replying to your mails.  However, at one
> point only Peter and me were still involved in doing actual work.  That
> is why a lot of packages have been dropped, preferring to concentrate on
> the different implementations and leaving the applications to their
> upstream developers or to some middleware software (like cl-builder or
> cl-launch).
>
> I do not understand what you think is slow and complicate in uploading
> packages, since there is no difference in how the team works WRT any
> other uploads: you prepare the package, you test it and you upload it,
> full stop.  If you are not a DD nor a DM you ask for a sponsor, again
> full stop.  This is the normal workflow for any other Debian package,
> being maintained in a team or not.

Thank you for letting me join the team.

I was not familiar with packaging at that time, and we both had no
time (also my bad English!), so we didn't keep in touch.  When I come
back this year, you and Peter are gone, there are only a few new
comers on the maillist.  We don't have any guides about the work and
must start from "scratch".  I'm going to reorganize some docs about
our team after I'm familiar with some facilities like c-l-c.

>
>> Shall we need an unofficial repo like emacs.orebokech.com to renew the
>> removed and outdated packages?
>
> Please do not.  I am quitting the team (other mails later on), so I do
> not care at all, but emacs.orebokech.com is not an "unofficial
> repository to renew removed and outdated packages".  On the contrary, it
> fills in a need for different people who wants to track Emacs
> development but they do not want to compile/install Emacs by themselves,
> especially considering messing up your Debian.  FYI, emacs-snapshot was
> once in Debian sid as well, but was then removed because of various
> reasons:
>
>  http://bugs.debian.org/413149
>  http://bugs.debian.org/417412
>
> And multiplying unofficial repository is not a good thing to do, since
> packages get rotted there as well as in the official repository.  Please
> understand that if you prepare a policy-compliant package for an
> official repository and you do not upload it to the official Debian one,
> you do more harm than good.  People need to add other repositories in
> their sources, packages are not "reviewed" when any large scale analysis
> (at the level of the whole repository) is done (simply think about the
> various archive rebuilding done by Lucas Nussbaum, for example) and so
> on.

Christoph has persuaded me.  I proposed it just because I prefer apt
to clbuild, since apt is mature, integrated with system, and, yes, I'm
not good at clbuild...

>
> Unfortunately, we are talking about cyclic problems in Debian, not at
> all specific to Common Lisp.  Having different teams should prevent
> failing, but this is not always true.  Again, I have no problem in
> recognizing my responsibilities in this fail, so shame on me.

Your work is great.  Thank you.

Regards,
Des