Re: TeXlive 2008 in Fedora 11?

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Patrice Dumas wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 02:37:13PM +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
>> Well, if you handwave packaging guidelines conformance away, 
> 
> It is not the point. Exceptions can be made when the cost is high and
> the benefit is low.

I think making exceptions is a good thing.  Our Guidelines should be
flexible enough to make exceptions when necessary.  But setting up the
analysis of when to make exceptions as "cost is high and benefit is low"
is doomed to failure.  There's a cost with any changes we make to how a
package wants to install when it comes fresh from upstream.  And the
benefit to that *individual* package is low.  But Fedora Linux, or any
Linux distribution, is more than the sum of its packages.  We're giving
our users a unified experience that is different than merely having them
download the package source, compile and install it themselves.  We're
giving them a unified, coherent set of programs which conform to certain
standards that it is possible for the end user to learn and apply to any
package that comes from us.

So rather than "cost is high, benefit is low", we need to understand
that exceptions are made when it doesn't make sense for the package to
follow the Guideline.  Conforming violates the spirit of the upstream
package.  It causes something to stop working with no way to fix it.  By
its very nature, the package is supposed to violate the Guideline.  And
when those are the case, we should be able to boil the Exception down to
some rule, know that that rule trumps the reasons for our current
Guideline, and write the Exception to cover that and future cases.

-Toshio

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