Re: Packaging insight for debian

[Chris Faylor <cgf at cygnus dot com>]

On Mon, Oct 09, 2000 at 08:32:18PM +0300, Eray 'exa' Ozkural wrote:
>Syd Polk wrote:
>> 
>> Factoring out the internal versions of tcl/tk is not a good idea. We have
>local
>> changes to these which could cause random failures, particularly when
>running
>> the test suite.
>> 
>
>Do you think making major changes to a forked tcl/tk is a good idea?

No, we don't think this is a good idea.  We're looking to minimize this
however we have to take other platforms besides linux into
consideration.

>Also, this didn't seem to play very nicely with the debian way of
>doing things. Which of course goes something like "if you use a
>general-purpose lib or lang. make it available in a generally usable
>and uniform way" This is how we cope with perl or tcl/tk. What would
>debian be like if every perl application distributed its own perl with it?

No one is advocating one library per application.  The version of tcl/tk
that comes with insight has some cygnus mods that we (i.e., Syd) are
trying to factor out and simplify but they can't be removed entirely.

>Anyhow, cygnus's changes to tcl/tk are not major extensions or anything
>really new.

Some of the changes deal with Cygwin.  Did your change to 8.3 accomodate
these changes?  I'll bet that they didn't.

>Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to port it to tcl/tk 8.3 It now works,
>and is probably bug-compatible with the pristine cygnus (red hat)
>version.

We support quite a few more platforms than Red Hat Linux.  So ensuring
that something works on Red Hat Linux is only a fraction of the battle
won.

>And if you'd tell me that you might be introducing something major in
>the future, you'd better introduce it into the upstream version of
>tcl/tk.  ;)

We have every plan to do this.

>PS2: I'm having to mail this from a remote machine because my ISP's
>mail server is on the ORBS. Is the only way to talk to the mail admin
>at my ISP?

That's the correct way.  Yes.

For tips on this, check out:

http://sources.redhat.com/lists.html#unsubscribe-desperate, item #7.

cgf