On 20-Aug-2002 Devin Carraway wrote: > Fairly often I've seen ITPs or package sponsorship requests followed up > to by questions about redundancy against packages already in Debian. > Thus, I'm curious -- what degree of redundancy is acceptable or > desirable? As big as a Debian distribution is, there's unavoidable > overlap. It's easy to understand, say, choosing one particular ping > implementation from a couple of functionally near-identical > possibilities. However, one package could functionally be entirely > provided by another, while still desirable by way of being smaller, > simpler, written in Python or whatever. It seems reasonable to provide > redundant packages when users could have a credible desire to use one or > another (e.g. one of the half-dozen minimalist windowmanagers.) Is > there a reigning convention? >
there is always a war between the old guard "I remember when I could name every package in Debian off the top of my head" versus the new generation of gFoo, kFoo, xFoo, myFoo, hisFoo. In the end I believe that as long as a package in Debian is being used by more than 1 person it has value. Let's fight the urge to just package something because it is interesting. However if there is a user base out there then Debian should support them. Our users should not have to compile software on their own.
