Matthew Miller wrote:
> I mean, some of y'all like to maintain and keep obscure dependency
> packages up to date just for their own sake, and that's *awesome* -- but
> we just can't hold everyone to that standard. At least, not if we want
> more than a few dozen packagers.
That is a pretty strong assertion, with no facts to back it.
I think that packagers are more likely to be driven away by changes such as
Modularity that make packaging more and more complex, or even by the very
fact that the dependencies they need were taken private by their maintainer,
than by the very reasonable minimum standard we want to hold our packagers
to.
A private dependency is necessarily a form of technical debt that is
inevitably going to hurt us as soon as we want to package something else
that happens to depend on that same dependency. (Unless of course the
dependency really cannot be used for anything else than building that one
dependent package, in which case nobody is going to expect the maintainer to
make it work for anything else even if it is public, so that trivial case
need not be considered any further.) Hence, this risks driving away the
people who would be packaging the other dependent packages if the dependency
was readily available to them.
And that is just the impact on packagers. You also have to consider the
impact on end users. Do not forget that most packagers were users before
becoming packagers. Hiding packages from users or labeling them as
officially unsupported is going to make Fedora less attractive to users,
which in turn will lead to fewer people potentially becoming packagers.
Kevin Kofler
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