Losses at Mandriva [LWN.net]

Losses at Mandriva

Posted Dec 3, 2008 22:15 UTC (Wed) by louie (subscriber, #3285)
In reply to: Losses at Mandriva by jspaleta
Parent article: Losses at Mandriva

I think you underestimate the number of build time choices that application developers force people to make.

That sounds like a problem to fix, not a problem to work around.

It's not like these upstreams are proprietary. If opensync 0.3 is broken, that indicates the people doing packaging downstream should have been spending their time doing QA upstream. Ditto for KDE4's dependencies, python's upgrades, etc. What you're saying is 'upstream is stupid, so we have to spend thousands of man-hours... not fixing upstream.'

(And yes, I have thousands of hours of experience doing both upstream and distro-level work, and like walters, I agree that the best option is always doing work upstream. The current arrangement is maddeningly wasteful and shouldn't be necessary for any but the most core packages.)

(Log in to post comments)

Losses at Mandriva

Posted Dec 3, 2008 23:00 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

All compile time choices are a QA issue? Hmm that's an interesting stance to take. I wouldn't go that far. Making some dependencies optional at compile time can be a deliberate design choice.

Are you saying that all optional functionality across all applications and projects which relies on external libraries should be coded as runtime detectable features and that compile-time linkages to optional libraries should be forbidden on the grounds of QA?

-jef