This is the mail archive of the cygwin-apps@cygwin.com mailing list for the Cygwin project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Re: [ITP] bashdb, bash_completion


Christopher Faylor schrieb:
On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 08:34:45PM +0200, Reini Urban wrote:
Christopher Faylor schrieb:
I read your email.  I guess my mind boggled at the concept that anyone
would be so..., er, bold as to assume that they could trump someone else's
package by using the name "bash.exe" when there is already an extremely
well-known package which uses that name.

As I said. Work this out with Ronald.

I'd love to.


And please don't send any more "ITPs" which wipe out other parts of
people's packages.

Why not? Shouldn't it be up to the user to make this decision?

In theory we try to protect the user from the consequences of bad decisions on the part of packaging.

Good point.


If a user has installed bash and bashdb and then reports a problem with
bash.exe should you or Ronald get involved?

That's easy.
If it's a bash problem Ronald, if it's a debugger problem me.
This is similar to the practice with the handling of cygwin-specific and upstream issues. And I don't see much wrong traffic where users cannot decide where to report problems.
Fixes in bash should get into the extended version as well. (Actually it's the opposite now. This is the part where I get angry.)


In reality and open-source the upstream maintainer should keep up with the pace, or his packages will get replaced by others. Ok, not so with bash for sure :) But it happened a decade ago on the shell side also. ksh, zsh, even bourne.

What will cygcheck report if you type "cygcheck -l bash" and bashdb
is installed?

What happens when Ronald releases a new version of bash and it wipes
out the bash.exe that bashdb has just installed?

That's up to the user. The user is always the most intelligent object in such decisions. He will complain to Ronald, (debugger, when?), he will complain to me (upgrade, when?).


Well, I'm just implementing some missing setup ini options:
Recommends Replaces Build-Depends Maintainer Installed-Size..., but this is a technical solution (mostly some Alert) which should be seen independently.


How is Ronald going to feel about your increasing his tech support burden
by requiring that he spend more time figuring out if a user is talking
about bash or bashdb?

I don't see any tech support activity (besides you and pierre), really.
How are the users going to feel, that known problems and known fixes are not integrated? Not even in experimental test versions? As for example Charles or you or Corinna do a really great job with our most important packages!


Users are not that stupid and want to try out proposed solutions just to check if this might fix their problems or not. And I'm not offering solutions, just a new feature, which will most likely not make it into the distro or a test release in the next few months, when I read the public statements from Roland and you here. Pierre is working for himself obviously.

How much extra mailing list traffic do you think will be generated when
someone on the cygwin list says "Me am newbie.  Me not find bash.  Me
need bash." and Larry Hall tells them to use the cygwin package search
to find bash.exe?

How much traffic is produced now with the current problems with the existing package?
How much traffic is produced with not-existing or not-getting upgraded packages? coreutils, apache, php, mysql-client and some more.


(Now, this is the point where everyone scrambles to the the cygwin
distribution and finds seven instances where a package wipes out another
package's files and says "See! See! We already DOOOOO IT!!!")

That's the most important point. Similar to the ploticus and prolog package overwriting /usr/bin/pl.exe (not yet discussed here to my knowledge) First serves I would say. bashdb is a bit different, so I will feel sympathetic if it will not get into release. I would feel much better it will get into the official version.

with bash_completion it is easy.
--
Reini Urban
http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/home/rurban/


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]