Hi
thanks for your long email, and I am more than happy to work with you and the Calibre team for better packaging.
But mark one thing: I'm not the official maintainer of Calibre in Debian, but I am trying to contribute!
Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
Don't see any bugreports in my admittedly inexpert search of the Debian bugtracker.
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Here it is
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugr...cgi?bug=720051
Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
It would be nice if Debian would stop shipping downstream manpages for binaries that no longer exist at all
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Good point, I will look into it. Just one recommendation: If you have complains, a bug report to the BTS always helps. Maintainers often forget about things and need a reminder. Anyway, I put it on my TODO list for calibre.
Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
start shipping the desktop files, icons and other XDG stuff that calibre does try to install.
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Can you be a bit more specific? The current packages do ship desktop files:
Code:
/usr/share/applications/calibre-gui.desktop
/usr/share/applications/ebook-viewer.desktop
/usr/share/applications/lrfviewer.desktop
and I don't see anything being removed after the call to install. If you can point out what is missing from the curretn calibre 3.1.1 packages, I will surely fix that!
Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
The fact that Debian has essentially forked calibre's system integration entirely with a vastly inferior downstream version is... well, I would say troubling except I don't actually have to deal with it on a personal level.  |
Can we please try to remain on a normal level without insults. Packaging isnot trivial, and it works best if *both* sides work together without insulting each other. Thanks.
As I said, I don't see what you are pointing at, esp wrt to system integration. If you have detailed complains, not general insults, I am happy to look into them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
Also if you could bug someone to re-enable the update notifier, that would be much obliged.
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That is a difficult point. Please put yourself for 1min into the position of a distributor with releases etc etc. Debian/stable (and for that matter *ANY* distribution) will have a certain version shipped in the stable release, with no updates. That is how Linux (and not linux, too) distributions work. You need to understand that an update notifier does not help at all.
Just to give you an example: I am the upstream devloper of TeX Live (4Gb of TeX, fonts, software) distribution, and I wrote our own update manager. At the sam etime I am packaging TeX Live for Debian. And there the update manager is not included, because *it*does*not*make*sense*. Users cannot update, root *should* not update as it breaks the whole Debian packaging infra.
Distributors and upstream have different requirements and targets. Calibre upstream has to accept this, too. It is better to work together instead of pointing fingers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
absolutely shoddy logic that "It uses a totally non-authenticated and non-trusted way of installing arbitrary code."
calibre plugins are curated by the moderators here before being linked to the plugin index, so the only possible danger ever was a man-in-the-middle attack between MobileRead --> calibre-ebook.com --> user.
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See the above. Instead of finger pointing, lets try to be civil and see what can be done. First of all, the update functionality is still here, nobody is blocked from using it (and I use it regularly), only the notifier is gone.
This is a general requirement in Debian that programs should *not* phone home if possible, unless started by the user. The user might be in an environment where certain things are prohibited, not welcome, and just automatically phoning home is not optimal.
Again, as with the above, distributors and upstream have different requirements. To go back to my example of TeX Live: I often thought about phoning home from the TeX Live manager, it could give us valuable information, but refrained from doing that, first because I don't want that anything happens on the user computer without explicit action (and second because Karl Berry would object ;-) )
So all in all, I don't see any serious problems here, and we can surely work out any differences. But packaging in many cases means compromising, and that means compromising for both sides.
Anyway, if you read down to hear, thanks for your long attention, and all the best
Norbert