On Mon, 13 Nov 2006 20:07:25 +0000
Andy Smith <andy@???> wrote:
> Or alternatively, those tenets have existed in the debian project
> since before mozilla organization, mozilla foundation and mozilla
> corporation existed.
Hear! Hear!
Debian's philosopy was well know in the community and the
fact that other distros do not follow them is not a reason for
bashing Debian. Much of what Debian maintainer's do when they patch
applications is to make them conform to the Debian way of doing
things to avoid things like the dependancy hell that was
commonplace a few years back with other package management systems.
The other reason upstream packages get modified is so they install in
the correct locations in the software tree, again in accordance
with Gnu guidelines.
This is an ongoing thing and recently for example stuff that used to
be in /usr/X11R6 has been moved to /usr/share or /usr/lib. My geneweb
database is now in /var/lib/geneweb and no longer in /usr/?? or
wherever it was originally.
There are sound reason why Debian does things the way it does. The
decision to fork firefox wasn't taken lightly but only after
months of eventually failed negotiations with mozcorp. I have read
comments that moz aren't that bothered about supporting the
unix/linux versions but want to concentrate on competing with MS.
--
John Lewis
Debian Linux with Geneweb genealogy application
