Re: gnustep debian app developer env setup (help needed)

[Yavor Doganov]

В Sun, 09 Nov 2008 19:05:26 -0500, Hubert Chathi написа:

> In theory, it should be fairly easy to provide backports for GNUstep
> packages in Lenny to keep up to date via backports.org.

But if we backport the core libraries, we'll have to backport
everything else from the GNUstep stack because of the SONAME bump...
Otherwise, we'll break the applications in the stable release when a
user installs newer GNUstep from backprorts.

> As far as GNUstep is concerned, Ubuntu should be no better (or no
> worse) than Debian unstable, because they just get their packages
> from Debian.

I can't speak about Ubuntu as I don't use it, but on gNewSense DeltaD
(based on Ubuntu Drepper) GNUstep was utterly broken.  On DeltaH
(based on Hardy) it is better, although still has tons of bugs (some
of them Debian-specific, which were fixed long time ago in Debian).

I believe the main reason is that Ubuntu people do not treat
RC/important bugs in GNUstep the same way they do for GNOME (say).
Also, they have to release on a particular date, which is a recipe for
a buggy distribution [1].  They also don't have the notion of
"maintainers" in the sense that Debian has, which I think is better in
some situations, but OTOH leads to negligence under certain
circumstances.

[1] I mean, if we discover a release-critical bug now in gorm.app,
    Lenny won't be released until we fix it (or if we can't, the
    package will be removed).  They don't have this luxury, so they
    sweep such bugs under the carpet if the package is not so popular.
    The same is true for any other package that is not used by the
    masses.  For example, my browser (Kazehakase) is buggy as hell in
    gNewSense, which cannot be said for Firefox or Epiphany.