... or why I mutilated your java package in Debian
This post is especially addressed to what we Debian Developers refer to as upstream maintainers
, that is the people who write/maintain the software that we package for Debian. It is meant to explain why, in some cases, Debian Developers prefer to mutilate
your work rather than upload it to Debian Archives in a state that gives it proper credit. And to apologize.
These opinions are my own, but I have a faint feeling that I'm not the only Debian Developer working like that, and that this few words could help soothe the relation betwenn Debian Developers and Upstream Maintainers, which can be quite tense some times...
It happens unfortunately quite often (too often!) that I disable (or don't enable) features in programs I package. Exact reasons vary, but they essentially fall into two categories:
- A feature requires code that does not comply to Debian Free Software Guidelines, which Debian cannot distribute. This is a no-go.
- A relatively minor feature depends on other software that are not packaged yet, and in which I don't have specific interest, which means I would not be able to maintain them properly (or it would require too much packaging work and so on...).
Java packages are especially affected by this problem, for a very simple reason. Java is one of the few (I don't say only because I'll probably be flamed to death) programming languages which allows very easy distribution of binary platform-independent libraries, in the form of JAR files. Many projects simply reuse and embed JAR files published for other projects in their own JAR files, often without precise references to where the source code can be found. Packaging a moderately-sized Java application often rely on dozens of embedded JARs, which we need to remove from the packages we build (as Debian does not distribute binaries without sources for many reasons), and for which we need to hunt down the original source code and often packaging the original project, which might pull in yet other dependencies and so on... A true nightmare ! That's why it is so tempting some times to simply drop some of the code, possibly write patches to disable references to removed libraries, and be done with it.
Therefore, I would wish to publicly apologize to any upstream
developer I've offended by stripping down apparently carelessly their beautiful software before uploading to the Debian Archives; I hope they now understand why I've done that.
Note to users: it is not because one of the features of your favorite software has been disabled by its (Debian) maintainer that you need to turn away from Debian ! Rather, file a bug report against the package. You'll get the reasons why the feature was disabled, and you have a chance to convince the maintainer to switch it back on.
