Re: 3.4 uploaded

[Thomas Weber]

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 10:00:17AM -0500, Judd Storrs wrote:
> 2011/2/10 Thomas Weber <address@hidden>
> 
> > No, you will not! Ubuntu decides what they ship and what not, in what
> > version, with whatever default compiler flags, with whatever additional
> > patches, ...
> >
> > They ship it, they handle it. They take the praise, they take the blame.
> > Period.
> >
> > If you wonder why I'm strict about this: going one step further, this
> > meant subscribing octave-maintainers to every major distribution's bug
> > tracker, just so 'we at least hear about the bugs'.
> >
> 
> I get that there's animosity between debian and ubuntu. 

No, this has nothing to do with Debian and Ubuntu per se. It's more
upstream and downstream and a sensible work relationship. 

> On the other hand, having an awful octave on ubuntu doesn't help
> octave. So what can I do? I'm willing to learn and understand what's
> going on on the ubuntu side, but honestly we get such hostility from
> you that I don't see how it's worth the effort.

Hostility? I consider myself to be totally indifferent towards Ubuntu or
any of the other 120+ Debian derivatives. Send me a sensible patch and
I'll apply it or forward it upstream, respectively (although in the
latter case I prefer if you send it to upstream directly - less work for
everybody involved). But I'm not going to handle the bug trackers of
those 120+ distributions - I already struggle with the Debian bugs.

If you look at the archive of the Octave user list, you will see that
once upon a time, I encouraged Ubuntu users to file bugs in Launchpad.
Stupid me thought that somebody there would look at them. I have stopped
completely even reacting to mails from Ubuntu users. It's a waste of my
time writing these mails and a waste of their time actually filing those
bug reports in Launchpad - they get ignored.

Let's look at the handling of Octave bug reports in Ubuntu:
http://bugs.debian.org/511817
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/inline-octave/+bug/211156
This is a bug report forwarded from Ubuntu, about inline-octave not
building. You can't see this from Launchpad, but what happened was the
following:

1) Person A in Ubuntu wanted to migrate all packages from octave2.1 to
octave3.0, so they changed the corresponding line in the control fields
of those packages, see
http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/changelogs/pool/universe/i/inline-octave/inline-octave_0.22-2ubuntu1/changelog
2) inline-octave never worked with octave3.0. Figuring that out wasn't
rocket size, because the package wouldn't *build*. But hey, actually
compiling software is the job of the QA department and as we all know,
QA is overrated; so that patch was committed. Then inline-octave failed
to build on Ubuntu's build servers for about 2 months (this is from
memory, I looked at it back then). 
3) Then, person A (yes, the guy who changed the package in the first
place) filed a bug in Launchpad that inline-octave wouldn't build.
4) Nothing happended for about 9 months, then a bug report was opened in
Debian by person B and closed within 24 hours with a short explanation
(actually, mine was short, Rafael provided a more explicit explanation).
5) Nothing happened in Ubuntu for more then 18 months. Yes, that's
right: despite being told about their invalid change in less than 24
hours, nothing was done in Ubuntu and then the bug was marked as
'wontfix', as we had dropped inline-octave from Debian in the meantime.

So, I am totally honest: I have no idea what's going on on the Ubuntu
side. But good luck in improving Octave there.

Oh, btw: I don't blame person A about this. He at least tried to care
for the packages in Ubuntu.

        Thomas