[Zlib-devel] Announce: zlib oss-qm branch release 1.2.5.3

[Enrico Weigelt]

* Mark Adler <madler at madler.net> wrote:
> Enrico,
> 
> On Jul 5, 2010, at 8:43 PM, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> > These are not artificial restrictions, but fundamental design issues.
> 
> 
> Your design decisions did not derive from nature.  They came from your mind and so by definition are artificial.

The whole computer science did not derive from nature, but is artificial ;-p

My primary concern is to keep complexity down to the absolute minimum
required. And beta's are conceptionally out of scope - it's exclusively
based on (stable) releases. Please refer to my paper.

> > Do you request that from all other distros too ?
> 
> Absolutely.  It's in the FAQ.

And do they follow ?
 
> > When was the last time you got any bug report on any distro branch ?
> 
> Let's see ... looks like about two hours ago.  See email copied below.  
> I can't tell where the heck he got what he has or who came up with the 
> name "zlib-devel".  

Trivial to see that it doesnt have anything to do with zlib, but
CentOS's package build system.

BTW: please route this address to the list, so we can take some 
of your load.

Ah, and if you're interested, I'll hack up an bugreport form, which
asks the user where he got the package from (which distro, etc).

> Obviously, I can't point out those cases where they think they have 
> an official distribution and I have not detected that they don't.

For some strange reason, you've got the strange luck that people
ask you instead of their distro maintainers. Never seen that in
this magnitude before.

Perhaps an big-fat warning on the zlib website could help
(or even my proposed bugreport form).
 
> > No, I dont. I'm giving it an completely different name, that 
> > just may happen to contain the same numbers.
> 
> Once it's compiled and installed, the name is lost.  The version 
> number remains.

The package management knows about this. People simply have to
call their distro maintainers, not the upstream - that's the
whole point. Sometimes we have to teach people to do so.


IMHO the main problem here is that you're driving the project more 
or less as an one-man-show - the maillist seems to be just a contrib 
party, not the core itself. (the lack of a vcs is also an indicator). 
This puts you under unnecessary load, which others (like me;-p) 
could easily take.


cu
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