Darxus,
I think you started the chain to update the debian files and
unfortunately, we now have Warren, Mark, Noah and Myself weighing in
recommending that the debian (AND I believe the redhat stuff) be removed.
One suggestion I have is to move the items to a contrib dir implying
they are as-is and not supported. Then perhaps even place them in a
pre-3.3.2 (or pre-3.4.0 dir) and a <current release> dir so if we want
to add the new debian files, they can go in that contrib directory. And
otherwise people know what is outdated and what hasn't been touched, etc.
Regards,
KAM
On 5/16/2011 4:54 PM, Adam Katz wrote:
First, I'm a big Debian fan. If we're including the RPM stuff, we
should include the DEB stuff. I agree with Darxus in that it is indeed
quite useful and doesn't create clutter or wasted bits since it is in
its own well-marked directory and is very small.
That said, its presence in our releases implies WE are supporting it.
While I would prefer it stay, I have to ultimately agree with Mark (who
happens to also be the FreeBSD package maintainer) when he said:
The package maintainers know their job and their distribution most
intimately and should have a full jurisdiction over their packaging.
We have the RPM information in our source tree. We also have one of the
Fedora (upstream -1) packagers with commit permissions (Warren). If he
is willing to keep it in sync, we can keep it. Otherwise, it will grow
stale and should therefore be pruned (or at least marked as such).
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/spamassassin
We have the DEB pieces in our source tree too, though Noah Meyerhans,
the Debian (upstream -1) maintainer is not an SA developer. Duncan
Findley is both a Debian and SA developer, but seems dormant in both.
I'm behind the ball in my plan to get Debian developer status. Based on
this, we should probably remove the debian directory.
http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/spamassassin.html
The clutter point is well taken too; even assuming another sufficiently
popular system has a similarly small and segregated footprint and a
maintainer willing to sync things up, there's the question of how
valuable it is. RPM and DEB are special cases because of large number
of derivatives that pull from Fedora or Debian in addition to the
non-derivatives that go direct, like Mandriva, SUSE, and Fink (OS X).
