On Mon, 23 Apr 2007 19:32:46 -0400 Joey Hess <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Neil Williams wrote: > > I chose Debian as a development platform for my own reasons and my > > decision was "not deemed to be wise" in the eyes of some of my > > upstream colleagues. As the newbie to that particular team, I was > > under significant pressure to "upgrade to Fedora or SuSE". Debian > > needs to reclaim the respect of upstream development teams and part > > of that is making it *a lot* easier to do upstream development on > > Debian without needing to become a DD as well. Debian is respected > > as a distribution for users because of the multiple architecture > > support and the patches and bug reports that are forwarded upstream > > - what is missing (IMHO) is respect for Debian as the distribution > > of choice for upstream development itself. > > Are you generalising from your one poor personal experience with a > non-Debian-friendly upstream, or do you have a significant body of > data that I don't about masses of upsteams who are not Debian > friendly? Generalising - which probably isn't giving me the best overview, you're right. > My impression has always been that a significant proportion of > upstreams use Debian, or are at least familiar with it. I base this > on, amoung other things, interacting with hundreds of different > upstreams whose packages I have maintained in Debian, as well as > working in linux companies and personally knowing a lot of upstream > developers. Do you then think that Debian should not require basic API docs if upstream don't provide them - even if the information is available (and properly distributable) from outside the .orig ? > The only significant documentation that is missing in Debian that I > know of is GFDL licensed docs which have been removed from main. > Aside from that, if a library is missing documentation, it's missing > it because it's not available upsteam either. The 'big' libraries are very well documented, it's the smaller ones. Individually these may not be significant but collectively, I think there is an appreciable gap in the API docs. Recently, I've been working with libarchive (deb-gview) and libgtkhtml (gtk2 port of quicklist). libarchive has nicely commented headers which could be turned into HTML but aren't, libgtkhtml has only a test program. (I've missed one -doc package myself - just noticed that libgpewidget can build a -doc package so that's just gone on the ToDO list along with a few wishlist bugs for the above packages.) Maybe instead of seeking API docs as a requirement it would be better to seek a section under "Best Practise" that outlines how man (3) can be used to provide at least an introduction to the API when the .orig does not contain docs itself? -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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