Exception request from FESCo for bundled libaries

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Mon Dec 14 19:09:22 UTC 2009


On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 6:44 AM, Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> wrote:
> Just to make clear, Nicolas's interpretation is correct.  Attempting to work
> around the problem by language lawyering does not promote better software.


Another specific non-library case.... the pytz package was shipping
its own timezone definitions separate from the tzdata package that
required additional maintenance (stupid shifts in daylight savings
time..thanks US congress.)  I was told about it, added a patch to pytz
and now it reads the tzdata resource files instead of shipping its
own. Less work for me as a maintainer long term.. one less aperiodic
package update for users...and more consistent timezone handling for
users.

The intention of the guidelines...is to guide people in using their
judgement on how to handle things. Now in the pytz case as soon as I
was made aware of the duplication of timezone resource files..it was
obvious that I should make a best effort to reuse a common system wide
set and it was easily done.

But sometimes its not obvious and that's when a peer discussion needs
to happen. Or sometimes its obvious but a best effort runs into
problems because of upstream customization or tweaking and that's when
a peer discussion needs to happen.  The guidelines help define the
boundary of the grey area when discussion really needs to happen.


-jef




More information about the devel mailing list