Re: [gpsd-dev] Recipe for installing new-enough scons is broken

[Hal Murray]

address@hidden said:
> With the release of jessie last month, 2.3 in in the archive.  These
> instructions can probably be removed, and replaced with "Use jessie (Debian
> 8.0)". 

That's the kind of attitude that drives people like me up the wall.

You don't get to tell me what distro or what version of a distro I decide to 
use.

[Apologies in advance if I misinterpreted what you were trying to say, but 
that's the way it came across.]

Gpsd does get to select which distros and/or which versions of distros they 
support.  It would be nice if there were a general policy that was simple and 
well advertised.

I'd expect something like "we support all supported versions of all major 
distros", with some qualification about needing a volunteer to test on that 
distro and a liaison to do whatever it takes to actually get the bits into 
the distro's support/distribution infrastructure if a distro wants to ship 
gpsd via their package manager.

Another possibility is to list the tools and versions that are required.  
That's clean, but inconvenient since most people don't keep track of which 
version of tools get shipped with the distro they are using and distros 
sometimes complicate things by making local mods.

In this context "support" has two interpretations.  One is runtime.  The 
other is build environment.  So you end up with something like "runs on 
wheezy but needs scons 2.3 from wheezy-backports to build".

Debian says they will support Wheezy for another year or so and via LTS until 
May 2018.
  https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases
  https://wiki.debian.org/LTS

Unless you are dropping support for building on wheezy (and Raspberrian and 
probably others), the directions for setting up wheezy-backports are still 
needed and will be needed for several more years.


-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.