Am 14. Oct, 2003 schw=E4tzte Deepak Saxena so:

> On Oct 14 2003, at 11:07, Bart Garst was caught saying:
> > Further more, if they can't provide a package for something as common a=
s
> > Mandrake, RedHat, or Debian, further suspicions as to the quality of
> > their stuff arise.

This is a general response, not directed at Bart, just using his sentence
and Deepak's response as a springboard :).

See below for Deepak's response. The gist, as I read it, is that there are
different tasks in producing a software product/package and development and
packaging aren't one in the same.

The point I'd like to add is that we need to remember most Free Software
developers generally have donated their time to write this software for
us. Oftentimes they've donated a lot of time. We can't expect them to do
things like we want. Heck, we can't expect products we've bought to have al=
l
the features we want.

We can offer suggestions and help. If something you want isn't packaged for
the system you want see if you can package it or see if you can find someon=
e
who can. Debian has a system to request new packages. I don't know about
other distros.

Today building from source is usually pretty easy. I still run into problem=
s
once in a while, though. Submit a bug report. Don't demand or expect a fix,
but let the developers know there's a bug. They likely won't fix it if they
don't know about it :).

Packaging for a distro is something the distro needs to do. That's their
'project'.

I'm grateful to those developer groups that provide RPM, deb, etc.
packages. That provides flexibiity for end users and likely makes it easier
for the distros to incorporate the package into their distro.

I'm more grateful that they've chosen to write something and release it to
the community under a Free Software license.

All this cool stuff exists because individuals decided to provide something
for others. Those of us benefitting should also find a way to give to the
community. Bitching at developers ( even those who might deserve it )
generally isn't the best way to give back :).

ciao,

der.hans

> The fact that somegroup of developers don't provide nice pre-built
> package for "common" distributions is completely irrelevant in regards
> to the quality.  Some large projects such as Gmome, KDE, etc have
> pre-built RPMs b/c a) they have a developer base of hundreds of people
> and more importanlty b) they are funded.  Not all open source projects
> are well funded and being an open source developer I can tell you
> that I am far more interested in writting code then making nice
> packages to make other people's life easier.  That's the reason that
> distributions exist.  If a package is not supported by someone's favorite
> distro, they can always ask them/pay them/volunteer if having a pre-built
> package is that important.
>
> Developing software and productizing/packaging software are two
> different beasts that should not be confused.
>
> ~Deepak
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