rawhide report: 20050319 changes

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 22:52:58 +0000, David Woodhouse <dwmw2 at infradead.org> wrote:
> I thought we had a brand-new policy of "no duplicate functionality",
> which we've even taken to the extent of dropping packages which overlap
> but still provide functionality which isn't available elsewhere.

Can you point me to an example of a library, a library used in another
package still in Core that has been removed because it was deemed a
duplication?  Its one thing to talk about application level
duplication.. its quite another to talk about duplication at the level
of libraries.  I honestly can't come up with an example of a library
being removed from Core, that was still in use by an application in
Core thus resulting in a loss of functionality in the application
which is still a part of Core.  Libraries like ones used by abiword
for example, where moved to extras because abiword was the only
application in Core currently using those libraries and thus were not
impacted by the move of the library.

My understanding is the duplication policy is aimed at the application
level and not at the library level primarly.  In the case of ant and
eclipse, if the jsch solution is limited compared to openssh perhaps
the best long term path is to make sure these applications can use
openssh libraries as a replacement of jcsh, and jcsh in turn can be
dropped. Until these applications can use openssh in this way however,
i don't see this as a problem nor as cutting against the policy of
preventing as much application duplication as possible.

-jef