[arch-general] Another rant on arch way abuse and false promises

[Ray Kohler]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 6:46 PM, Arvid Picciani <aep at exys.org> wrote:
> Ray Kohler wrote:
>>
>> 2009/12/1 Ng Oon-Ee <ngoonee at gmail.com>:
>>>
>>> When I started on here the mantra was "Arch is what you make it".
>>> Packagers strive to make packages which are as vanilla as possible
>>> (without breaking) and provide the utility expected of such packages. Of
>>> course, if you want a system without hal/dbus, there's ABS and AUR. I
>>> don't see why your dislike of particular implementations implies that
>>> every user of Arch should forgo those implementations.
>>
>> I've been thinking about this particular part of the "Arch way". I
>> think what causes the conflict in some of these cases is that
>> "trusting upstream" - one of our major principles - only works when
>> upstream is sane. Wacky things (like what freedesktop.org has been
>> doing to Xorg for a while now) make me begin to think this assumption
>> is violated in some important cases. When upstream ceases to really
>> care about Arch-like systems and only support more Ubuntu-like
>> systems, we have a problem with our "don't patch" philosophy.
>
> This implies that you're not ok with what happened to X.  So you support my
> position. What you did not realize, however, is that these things are not
> upstream defaults. They have been specifically enabled downstream by the
> arch maintainers.

Actually, I did notice that. I didn't intend my comments to apply
directly to this particular case. I am, however, in support of the
particular changes you want for this case, though not strongly enough
to get excited about it.

> It is likely that the upstream will, as a reaction to my suggestion to reset
> to upstream defaults,  add these options as default. I then suggest to still
> keep the upstream defaults, and maintain a fixed version of the package on
> aur.
>
> The "sanity" here is very biased, hence there is no non-biased correct
> solution, other then that suggested by the founder Judd.

What I personally am in support of, in the general case, is
"suckless.org-style" minimalism, rather than following upstream's
direction. So if upstream changes the default to enable the hal and
dbus bits, I will then be in favor of Arch disabling them, and we'll
be in disagreement then. (That said, if that actually does happen, I
won't asking the Arch devs to implement my wishes, since they'd
clearly be in violation of the Arch way.)