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RE: Counter-ITP of doxygen (was: Re: Please upload: doxygen-1.4.2_20050410-1 (n'th take))


At Wednesday, May 04, 2005 5:48 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On May  4 17:27, Carlo Florendo wrote:
>> 
>> Lastly, what if the maintainer does not have the technical skill to
>> debug the package being maintained (but just has the capability to
>> package new releases?)
> 
> Yes, that is a problem.  IMHO a maintainer should at least be able to
> port the package by him- or herself to Cygwin and not rely on foreign
> work.  Some knowledge how to use the package would be fine, too, but
> sometimes people just use a small part of the features of a package
> and don't know others.  Nothing wrong with that, as long as the
> maintainer knows about the Cygwin specific glitches.  Every general
> package use is typically not to be discussed on the Cygwin list
> anyway. 
> 
> As for debugging... if somebody ports a package, basic debugging
> skills are either available or will build up the hard way.
> 
> Corinna

This is very close to a question I've had for a while.  Could a maintainer
be someone who has no debugging skills and will never have any?  Corinna's
answer did not, for me at least, really answer Carlo's (and my) question.  A
maintainer "able to port the package by him- or herself to Cygwin and not
rely on foreign work" does not need to "have the technical skill to debug
the package being maintained" if the package compiles OOTB.

There are packages that I've compiled OOTB or with very minor changes that
were suggested by error messages (fixing paths, downloading missing
library/development packages, and the like).  I've put them in my /usr/local
but I would prefer to see as part of the official distribution.  Also, I'd
like to give a bit more back to the community than I've been doing so far.

Although I can write reasonable shell and awk scripts, my real programming
skills are nil.  In other words, I cannot see my basic debugging skills
building up in any way, hard or otherwise.  Would it be inappropriate for
someone like me to ITP a package, even though the first time someone reports
a problem the package will probably have to be removed because I will not be
able to fix the problem?

Thanks for your guidance and sorry for the delayed posting.  I realize that
a follow-up 5 months after the original post has not been made in a timely
manner.

- Barry

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behalf of NIAID, and NIAID does not accept liability for them.


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