Dan Pritts <danno@internet2.edu> writes:
> On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 10:36:09AM -0400, Alex McKenzie wrote:

>> perhaps something the devels should think about.  If they decide to
>> continue on the way they have... well, that's their option.  It's their
>> project, and they can do what they want with it.  But they should at
>> least be aware that people are concerned about the current methods.

> I tend to agree with Alex, FWIW, but I too recognize that I get what I
> pay for.

Out of fairness want to note that the most significant component of the
problems with the OpenLDAP packages for Debian (and Ubuntu, to a somewhat
lesser degree) is that the packaging team has basically no resources.
Only two of us have done much work over the past year or two, and then
only as we've found time, and neither of the two of us who are active have
any free time to spare to increase the amount of work that we're doing
significantly.

This is not something that either is the fault of the OpenLDAP project or
something that any of the OpenLDAP developers can address even if they
wanted to unless they wanted to become experts in Debian packaging.
Debian and Ubuntu need more people with a thorough understanding of Debian
packaging working on improving the packages.

At this point, nearly all complaints about the state of the Debian
packages are rightfully directed at the lack of resources on the Debian
side.  There may be some issues that could be reasonably considered a
shared responsibility were the packages in much better shape, but at this
point they're swamped by the lack of volunteer resources to absorb new
upstream releases and do reasonable bug triage.

Unfortunately, we're currently in a state where the people involved in the
packaging don't have enough free time to teach even interested parties
about packaging so that they can come up to speed and help.  We really
need volunteers who already know the packaging components and can start
working at that level without needing much additional resources or
training.  Both Steve and I are already doing about a dozen other
high-profile things for Debian and are both involved in the packaging of
OpenLDAP primarily out of pure self-interest in not wanting to see the
packages go completely untended, not because we have any realistic ability
to maintain the packages as they properly should be maintained.

I do the Debian package maintenance for OpenAFS, which has a similar or
higher change rate as OpenLDAP and also doesn't do a lot of support for
old stable versions, but the end user experience is much, much better and
the same complaints are not present simply because on the packaging side
I'm able to apply more resources.  I have the time to aggressively package
new versions, pull up upstream changes inbetween releases (admittedly,
made *far* easier than it would be for OpenLDAP by OpenAFS's use of Git),
and backport newer versions for users of Debian stable.  When Debian users
of OpenAFS run into problems fixed in later versions, I can just tell them
to go to the version from backports.org to solve their problem.  This
doesn't require any additional work from the OpenAFS upstream maintainers.

There's absolutely no reason why the same thing couldn't be true of the
OpenLDAP packages for Debian and Ubuntu, without any changes whatsoever to
how the OpenLDAP developers run their project.  All it requires is
volunteers and time.

--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>