Fwd: Re: Subsurface

Dirk Hohndel dirk at hohndel.org
Tue Dec 16 07:05:29 PST 2014


On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 10:29:22AM +0000, Pedro Neves wrote:
> On 16/12/2014 11:20, Pedro Neves wrote:
> >Hi Sylvestre:
> >
> >I'm writing you because I saw you name as a maintainer for the Debian
> >Subsurface package (https://packages.debian.org/experimental/subsurface).
> >
> >I'm also involved with the Subsurface project and we'd like to know if and
> >how it would be possible to have official subsurface packages on Debian.
> >
> >Any advice would be very welcomed.
> >
>-> Sylvestre> This is not really trivial...

Tell me about it :-)

>-> Sylvestre> If you want to package it for Debian stable, it will probably requires
>-> Sylvestre> backport of other libraries.

Debian stable is not a reasonable platform to develop for. Most everything
I need doesn't exist or exists in ancient version. And I don't believe any
sane person uses Debian stable as their desktop. Certainly not a diver who
needs a prebuilt package.

>-> Sylvestre> If you want to make it official for Debian testing (jessie), you could
>-> Sylvestre> without too much damages.

I'll be happy to talk about this, but only at my terms, sorry. A static
libdivecomputer, built from our branch of libdc, and our private
libssrfmarblewidget, also built from our branch. But actually, I take it
back, see below.

> If you want to follow up this, it's ok. If not, I can try to explain him
> that we have our own packages and check with him what would it take to
> upload those to Debian...

I think Sylvestre is on this list, at least he used to be.

What people seem to be missing is this:

I really don't care whether Subsurface is part of the official package
feed of any distribution. That's like asking me if I care if Subsurface
became part of what Apple ships in Mac OS X 10.10.5 or what MSFT ships as
Windows 10.

All I care about is that it is easy to install ON those OSs.

I repeat. the way the Linux community deals with applications is insane
ass-backwards broken bullshit. I am not interested.

The Subsurface PPA in Ubuntu which works for LinuxMint and Debian testing
is all I care about. It makes it easy enough for the casual user to
install Subsurface. That's the goal. Nothing else.

The more I think about it, I would actually prefer if the distros DROPPED
Subsurface and did NOT package it. I still see occasional reports
complaining about bugs in Subsurface 4.0 - because that's what's in
someone's official repositories.

I think I'll add language like this to the announcement, asking people NOT
to install anything but the binaries that we provide.

/D


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