[tex-live] Re: Packaging SourceFiles for TeX live/Debian

Frank Küster frank at debian.org
Tue Aug 2 16:15:03 CEST 2005


karl at freefriends.org (Karl Berry) wrote:

>     Anyway, I have started to add dpatch support for all the packages, and
>     just fix these wrong locations with a dpatch.
>
> It seems problematic to me to make Debian TL have source changes which
> do not exist in the original TL.  Is this really a path we want to go down?
>
> It will lead to the same pseudo-forking as occurs for everything else in
> the Linux distributions -- changes get made, never get propagated back.
> So there are different versions floating around.  This can only increase
> confusion and trouble.
>
> Of course I know perfectly well that it takes tons and tons of time to
> send changes back to upstream, and I don't blame you for not wanting to
> do it.  So are these changes really important?  Why spend your time
> working on these things simply to quiet some tool, when they have
> existed for many years and no one has complained?  Aren't there more
> important things to be working on?

I agree.  A patch in Debian should either be really Debian-specific
(e.g. dvipdfm(x) uses libpaper (which doesn't seem to exist elsewhere) to
get a default papersize), or it should be submitted to the responsible
upstream person.  

You won't be able to forget those problems, lintian will keep you
informed.  Therefore you can delay fixing them to when you have time to
contact upstream responsibles, too.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer



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