On Wed 2008-03-26 16:46 , Jan de Groot wrote:
[...] If patching is no longer allowed, get ready for a time where packages are stuck in testing for ages because upstream broke it. Get ready to run a distro that breaks your system on every pacman -Syu because upgrade paths are not handled. Yes, this is win win win I guess.
If we want to go this way, I consider myself as ex-developer and switch to another distribution or operating system that just works and gives me the power to do things the right way. Instead of building packages for people that tell me I'm doing the wrong thing, I'll do upstream software development, in this case GNOME.
I think we are overrating the problem here. I never saw in Arch's packages patches applied just for fun, or to add useless features. Most of the patches are to make software compile with the new release of gcc, to fix broken makefiles and the like. One of the few packages with a lot of patches is the kernel, but most of them only add hardware support, e.g. I have no idea why mactel patches aren't merged in the vanilla tree, but I'd like to boot Arch on my macbook anyway. IMHO the actual maintainer of kernel26 is doing a good job. If someone wants a kernel26-zomgvanillaistehbest , he can remove all the patches and create the packages by himself. -- Alessio (molok) Bolognino Please send personal email to themolok@gmail.com Public Key http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xFE0270FB GPG Key ID = 1024D / FE0270FB 2007-04-11 Key Fingerprint = 9AF8 9011 F271 450D 59CF 2D7D 96C9 8F2A FE02 70FB