Subject: Re: [PATCH] remote-helpers: point at their upstream repositories

From: James Denholm <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 18 May 2014 01:24:23 +0000

Felipe Contreras wrote:
> James Denholm wrote:
> > On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 05:39:42PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> > > (...) I would venture to say you have never made a package in your
> > > life.
> > 
> > And you have, Felipe? Let us see the years of experience you surely have
> > in the field.
> 
> As a matter of fact, yes I've written many packages, for Debian, Fedora,
> ArchLinux, and others. Even Windows installers.

I'd hardly say that a few PKGBUILDs count. I've written some myself, not
hard to do.

That said, if I had realised you were going to discuss such a trivial
thing - _making_ packages rather than _maintaining_ them in a repo - I'd
have dismissed your statement as mere idiotic vitriol.

Do you honestly think that Junio has _never made a package?_ Never, on
any of the systems he's ever touched, run makepkg or debuild or
whathaveyou?

I could be wrong here, but I'm fairly sure that Junio is a *nix software
developer of some kind or another. You know, given that he's the
maintainer of git, kinda might be the case. And I really doubt that any
*nix dev, _anywhere_, could have _any_ sort of success without looking
sideways once or twice at a package builder, given that pre-release
homebrewing of expected packages is only an absolutely critical part of
testing.

Come on, man. Don't be silly.

> But that's a red herring. Even if was the worst packager in history,
> that doesn't make Junio's decision any more correct.

No, but it would render your bizarre, tantrum-like accusations as
generally baseless. I mean, I don't think anyone actually puts weight on
them anyway, but hey, never hurts to shine a spotlight on nonsense.

> > > The fact that you think packagers of git would simply package
> > > git-remote-hg/bzr as well is pretty appalling.
> > 
> > It's not an outlandish thought, in fact, I'd suggest it as probable -
> > provided that they find the projects to be stable and of high quality.
> 
> Do you want to bet?

Not a betting man. However, ignoring that for a moment, I doubt we'd be
able to agree on checks and balances for the case where
git-remote-hg/bzr were rejected due to the code being of poor quality or
unstable. So no, I won't bet, because you hold your own work and
opinions as sacrosanct and infallible.

> > You, or someone else, might have to tap them on the shoulder and play
> > nice to _ensure_ they know about them (after all, we all know that
> > packagers _never_ read READMEs, do they), but you're capable of that,
> > I'm sure.
> 
> In my experience packagers scratch their own itches, and if
> git-remote-hg/bzr are not their itch, I don't see why any amount of
> nice poking would make them package them. Some other packager would have
> to do it, not the Git packagers.

If there's a demand, Felipe, and the build process is sane, I can't see
why they wouldn't. Package maintainers are aware they provide a service
to their distributions. If you really want, poke them _with_ the
majority of the necessary work done, hand them the
PKGBUILDs/whathaveyou yourself. Pre-scratch the itch if you really feel
they won't care.