On Wed, 2015-08-26 at 13:40 +0300, Lubomir I. Ivanov wrote: > your approach for convincing is offensive and unwise. Well if upstreams are effectively hostile against core paradigms of the FLOSS community, it must expect that people won't be happy with it.
> as a peace of software it now no longer obeys the Linux distribution > rules; it's setting a bad example at the expense of not being > available everywhere at anytime in the ecosystem. Being not available is not the problem by itself. There's many software which is not packaged for Debian. The problem is when you have projects which intentionally work against some of the base principles of open source software, as here: the apparently expressed wish of upstream to be under fully control of the program (like being the only place where it's been distributed, people not adapting it without renaming, etc.) > otherwise, why would you even care if some odd divelog software is no > longer distributed by distro X? It's like when DLRS manufacturers bring out a new mount system... they promise you everything that this will be *their* system for the future. People start to invest (money) in it,.. and not rarely it happened that the manufacturer changed the mount some years afterwards. The point is: People "invested" in subsurface, in the sense that they stored all their data in it,... and part of the decision for that may have been the believe that subsurface acts like any other typical sane open source project - in this example: not trying to keep distros from properly packaging software. If the subsurface people would have said from the beginning: "This is our nice fancy new diving log software. Use it, but beware that we want to keep full control (unless you fork) and in 2 years we'll try to prevent distros from packaging." than I guess many people (at least myself) would have never used it in the first place. On Wed, 2015-08-26 at 08:54 +0200, Christian PERRIER wrote: > For sure, I well understand that redisigning Subsurface to use a > different storage backend is not something one can reasonably > considerbut maybe having this as an option could be nice. Actually, the XML backend already exists (or did so?). I even think it's the only usable backend in the most recent version of the official[0] Debian package. > I do share Christoph's feeling about the "raison > d'ĂȘtre" > of distros and, well, I'm never happy when this is not well > understood.... Well I guess it's perfectly fine and politically simply the best and only choice to throw out packages that behave bad,... such hostility against distributions cannot be accepted as it threatens the FLOSS model at whole. And IMHO neither distributions nor the community should accept projects which call themselves open/free, but basically demand full control and renaming/forking when one starts to change bits of the "experience"[1]. The FLOSS philosophy isn't just about having some open source license, but on the other hand making it basically impossible to freely use software as people wish (in this case: properly packaged in distributions) with the small side node that people could always simply fork if they're not happy. That's the Oracle way of handling open source. So, right choice from Debian,... it's just a pity that all people who put their trust into subsurface are now kinda screwed. Best wishes, Chris. [0] Official = the one from Debian [1] Funny, btw, that this rule apparently only applies to downstreams. If such upstream does the very same, like subsurface changes the "experience" of libdivecomputer/etc. a rename is apparently not deemed necessary by them ;-)