[arch-general] Another rant on arch way abuse and false promises (was: xf86-input-evdev conflicts with xorg-server. Remove xorg-server?)

[Jan de Groot]

On Tue, 2009-12-01 at 23:51 +0100, Arvid Picciani wrote:
> Aaron Griffin wrote:
> 
>  > Which package has patches to add these features? Looking at
>  > xorg-server, I only see one extraneous patch that simple replaces the
>  > default grey stipple pattern with black. The rest seem (at a glance)
>  > to fix real bugs
> 
> You have a point here, in that i have used a fuzzy description of the 
> problem, in the assumption you and possible other readers remember the 
> numerous rants on this ML. At very least I'd except You to remember your 
> own blog. I'm going to post some hard facts to your convenience.
> 
> aep at andariel: ~ egrep 'enable|disable|patch -N' 
> /var/abs/extra/xorg-server/PKGBUILD | wc -l
> 24
> 
>  > Jan has always done a good job in the past of keeping Xorg as
>  > impartial as possible without breaking things, and I'm assuming he did
>  > the same here.
> 
> i was about to state that i didnt target him at all. Then i ran this:
> 
> aep at andariel: ~ (for i in $(grep "Jan de Groot"  /var/abs/ -r | cut -d 
> ':' -f 1); do egrep "enable|disable|patch -N" $i; done) | wc -l
> 543
> 
> Now you're propably saying numbers of downstream decisions doesn't say 
> anything. Very true, which is why i prefer arguing about "intent"
> 
> aep at andariel: ~ grep Maintainer /var/abs/core/dbus-core/PKGBUILD
> # Maintainer: Jan de Groot <jgc at archlinux.org>
> 
> and "bias"

So, just because I'm the maintainer of a package that is required for a
lot of the packages I maintain makes me biased.
Now, first of all: most of the patches that I apply are from upstream
git/svn, or come from upstream bugtrackers fixing accepted bugs. Then
about the dbus dependency in xorg: we do specifically enable
config-dbus, but dbus is a dependency anyways:

AC_ARG_ENABLE(config-hal,     AS_HELP_STRING([--disable-config-hal],
[Build HAL support (default: auto)]), [CONFIG_HAL=$enableval],
[CONFIG_HAL=auto])

So, having hal installed on your system means vanilla hal
autoconfiguration in xorg-server. As for the other --disable and
--enable flags: most of them are default or autodetected. In some cases
we don't want something and --disable it, in some other cases we want
these things enabled so we --enable them. Flaming based on the count of
--enable/--disable flags and the amount of applied patches does not help
anything, and it doesn't improve a distribution or discussion either.

> aep at andariel: ~ (for i in $(grep "Jan de Groot"  /var/abs/ -r | cut -d 
> ':' -f 1 | cut -d '/' -f 5); do  if (pacman -Si $i | grep gnome 
>  >/dev/null); then echo $i; fi; done) | wc -l
> 149

Ooh, so I'm the GNOME maintainer, what next?

> > The point is, just because *I* prefer something 
>  > one way doesn't mean it's a good decision at the distro level.
> 
> So there is the name of some guy, who approves the unix philosophy, on 
> this distro, but that guy decides it's a good idea that people who 
> prefer ubuntu make the vital decisions.
> 
> I claim, You are leading a project whichs developers mainly
> disprove what You stand for, or claim to stand for.
> Which is why, ...

I never even installed Ubuntu on any system, how can I prefer it? Arch
has thousands of packages that need to work together, sometimes you
can't stick to your so called "unix philosophy".