Quoting Steve Litt ([email protected]): > I'm the originator and 2 year maintainer of the VimOutliner project. > The Debian package substituted a double backslash \\ for the double > comma ,, command prefix. When I said that the double comma was > selected for speed purposes and that double backslash was a huge > slowdown, the Debian maintainer gave me this song and dance about > customary defaults in Debian and Vim. Meanwhile, as "upstreams", we > were forever asked to debug Debian installations because they didn't > work. After a few attempts, we just told them Uninstall your Debian > VimOutliner and install from our tarball. That was the quickest fix.
As our Aussie friends say, 'Good on ya.' Thanks for VimOutliner. During that period, it would have been a fine and good thing (if you felt like it) for you to produce a .deb and publish it at an apt-compatible repo URL. Nobody has any right to demand this, and people should be grateful for your work -- but IMO in general installing from upstream tarballs _if there is a reasonable alternative_ is a very bad idea and should be strongly discouraged for new Linux users, for many individually compelling reasons. During the long period when I was one of the main editors for _Linux Gazette_, I wrote about this several times (often as an editorial footnote to well-intended articles) to make sure our readers were not mislead by bad advice, such as here: http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/weatherwax.html#1 As you know, Steve, I am an avid and appreciative reader of your technical articles -- but one of the things you frequently urge on readers that I feel is misguided is (IMO) urging immediate resort to upstream tarballs in cases where this is _not_ necessary and not the best choice. (To phrase my specific point about VimOutliner a different way, you do the free-software world a notable favour by maintaining VimOutliner, and the correct comment first and foremost is 'Thank you', so: Thank you. If you felt like helping people even more, helping them better, and helping more people, taking that small extra step using debhelper to create a package would also be cool.) OTOH, there certainly are cases where dispensing with the extra work of making a package is perfectly reasonable because there isn't enough advantage to justify the extra work. An init system and/or supervisor such as runit would probably be a good example of that. (I noted these exceptions in the last two paragraphs of my footnote.) _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
