* Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Hi folks,
> > A patched-to-death kpdf? > > Yeah, ubuntu patches KDE left and right and it's a bit annoying, especially This raises the question how much patching is good for an distro. As far as I understood Gentoo's policies, ports should stay as close as possible to the upstream. In fact in some ebuilds much magic is happening to get around really broken upstream (ie. netqmail). I understand that policy, but IMHO it doesn't go far enough. My ideal would be: * The distro should not contain any broken package. If it does not run out of the box and requires additional packages, I'd consider it as broken. * An package must provide all customizability which is required for that distro (ie. specifying pathes, DESTDIR installing, switching features, etc). Otherwise: broken. * The buildsystem must be clean and easy to use. The necessary steps (unpacking/preparing the sourcetree, configuring, compiling, installing) must be doable with just an command line, without any additional logic required. Otherise: broken * Builds have to be deterministic. No hidden and unnecessary deps. And crosscompiling must be possible w/o any code changes. Otherwise: broken. Okay, these are really hard constraints (which have been proven in my embedded works), BUT: * If an package is broken and upstream release an really fixed version within reasonable time, we simply fork off an "stabelized" branch. * That branch is normally provided by an single patch against the upstream release. * Fixes here are done generic, not distro specific. * The forks are maintained in an separate project, independent from distros, but working close to them. * This project also works close to the upstream and also tries to get the fixes in. Actually that's what my OSS-QM project is all about. (ugh, just seen the wiki's still offline after I rebuild my server, so I'll post the link once I got it up again ;-O) BTW: the OSS-QM project works very close to the CSDB. (http://sourcefarm.metuxde/) cu -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- Enrico Weigelt == metux IT service - http://www.metux.de/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- Please visit the OpenSource QM Taskforce: http://wiki.metux.de/public/OpenSource_QM_Taskforce Patches / Fixes for a lot dozens of packages in dozens of versions: http://patches.metux.de/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
