Re: [Quilt-dev] quilt and debian (was something else)

[Jean Delvare]

Hi Martin,

Le lundi 23 novembre 2009 14:20, Martin Quinson a écrit :
> Le dimanche 22 novembre 2009 à 21:42 +0100, Andreas Gruenbacher a
> écrit : 
> > On Sunday 22 November 2009 15:47:58 Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> > > BTW, we have lots of patches in the Debian package, but the current
> > > maintainers (me included) are quite busy and most of them have not yet
> > > been properly forwarded.
> > 
> > I didn't see some of those fixes ever before.  You Debian guys must really 
> > like maintaining stuff yourself, else you would have pushed most of that 
> > upstream right away.
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I agree that we kinda have a communication problem. As far as I can say,
> it goes back to Feb 2007, and this mail in particular:
> http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/quilt-dev/2007-02/msg00017.html
> 
> which is the answer to a mail proposing the most important patch of the
> debian pile: the conversion of backup-files into a shell script. As long
> as this important patch isn't accepted by you guys, there is no need to
> try pushing the other little ones. The other fixes are details. At
> least, that's my point, even if it can be debated. 
> 
> The thing is that I read this mail as "your patch is not good enough, I
> have a better solution here, but you should redo it by yourself". I got
> demotivated by this: I fully understand that the patch is improvable,
> but I'm not having any exam here. If there's a better way of doing so,
> why not sharing it? I'm not blaming anyone beside me: that's a feeling
> that I should have shared with you guys since a long time (ie, almost 3
> years). I never even tried to ask Jean for the improved patch, shame on
> me.

I am sorry about what happened. I remember I left the quilt
development team for a while at about that time, so probably I did
not feel well with the way things were going either. Maybe I did not
express myself properly, or have been rude when I did not mean to be.
All I really wanted was to work with you on the backup-files rewrite.
I did not want to commit an heavily modified version without your
consent. I simply did not want to give the impression that I was
stealing your work. On top of that, I was not 100% positive that all
my proposals were good... it's not like I master bash at all.

> (...)
> Andreas, please feel free to pick and integrate the easy patches, I'll
> try to improve the backup-files patch this week.

I still believe we want this shell-based backup-script, no matter how
high the performance penalty is. quilt was written in bash after all,
which pretty much implies that we do no care about performance;
otherwise a different language would have been chosen. Meanwhile, a
noarch quilt package would be very nice to have. And think about how
smaller/faster the configure script will become :)

-- 
Jean Delvare
Suse L3