Losses at Mandriva

In general I would agree with jspaleta's reply. I think the likelihood of anyone believing that a world where developers maintained all the packages would be a good one has a directly inverse relationship to the number of packages that person maintains. =)

I am currently working on migrating Mandriva's development branch from Tcl/Tk 8.5 to Tcl/Tk 8.6. This involves updating a bunch of rather obscure applications that use Tcl.

When you do this kind of thing on a regular basis you get a deep and meaningful understanding of just *how* crack-addled a set of build scripts a really determined developer can write, when they set their minds to it. It's not pretty.

OK, yes, I could carefully re-implement all these build scripts in autotools or cmake or something so that they will work across all distributions and Solaris and contribute them back to upstream. Hell, I probably should. If the build script is mostly sane, I fix it and send the patch. But if it's a gigantic ball of pain, I just hack it up so it works for building a Mandriva package (but would not work at all on any other distro or if you were building from source), and move on. Because it needs to get done, and if I spent all my time re-writing shit build scripts I'd never actually get the original task (migrate to Tcl 8.6) done.

Plus, half of these projects have been dead for years. But we still need the app, because someone out there still uses it, and no-one ever bothered to write a modern replacement because the old thing still more or less works. So where would I send the fix?

Basically, when the happy-clappy "let's have one awesome universal package base!" theory runs into the mundane reality of developers who have no clue how to install things properly and years-dead projects, it dies in a hurry.