[Pkg-running-devel] Bug#789875: subsurface: FTBFS in experimental

[Sylvestre Ledru]

Le 27/08/2015 05:33, Michael Gilbert a écrit :
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 7:11 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> So quite frankly, the fact that Debian people now attack Dirk, who has
>> been bending over backwards over these kinds of stupidities, is not a
>> big surprise. I think it's in the Debian DNA to care more about rules
>> than about technical sanity. The whole "this is the only right way to
>> do licensing" thing extends to "this is the only correct waty to do
>> packaging".
>>
>> It's sad to see.
> Perhaps it isn't clear external to the project, but participation in
> the Debian BTS does not automatically make one a Debian person, which
> not a defined status.
>
> The maintainer of the subsurface package, an official Debian status,
> removed the package on request, so in many ways, problem happily
> solved?
>
Even if I am not the initial packager of subsurface, I was the
maintainer for the past
few years.
I think we worked great with Dirk. He uplifted some of my patches
without any issue,
always been friendly and quick to answer. He was a great upstream. We
quickly discussed
at the New Orleans during Linux Plumber about this packaging.

Now, he thinks that the way we do things in Debian is not the right way
for subsurface.
To be honest, for libraries being heavily modified, I agree with him.
Sometimes, it is necessary to ship embedded sources. It is a crazy waste
of everybody time
to try handling that.
Daily, I see that at work. Being a release manager for a major web
browser, I see a lot of hacks
being done on some libraries like Cairo or Skia. Even if they get merged
upstreams and upstreams
release a new version, the latency is too important. That does not scale
for Debian. Recently, a top crash
on fedora was caused because they were using the system cairo and not
the one shipped by upstream (
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1253086 ).
In some cases, shipping third party libraries into the upstream code is
the best way.

Sylvestre