While working on the RaspberryPi setup, which I decided is going to use wview as the main component, I’ve started wondering once again why some upstream projects really feel like they don’t want to be friendly with distributions and other developers at all.
It’s not like they are hostile, just really unfriendly.
First of all, wview comes with its own utility library (more on that in a different post); both projects don’t have a public repository, they are developed behind closed doors, but you can send patches. This is bothersome but not a big deal. But when you send patches, and it goes weeks without answers, and without any idea if the patch was merged, well, things get bothersome.
But this is not the only project lately that seems to have this kind of problems. Google’s PageSpeed has binary package snapshots for Debian and CentOS but they have no related source release. Indeed, if you want the sources, you’re supposed to fetch them from the repository using Google’s own repo tools, rather than any standard SCM software. While I was interested in trying the module, the idea of having to deal with repo tools once again didn’t enthusiasm me, so I stopped looking into it at all.
This, to me, looks like a common problem: who cares about the policies that distribution had for years, make it agile, make it easy, and stop doing releases, git is good for everybody and so is bzr, hg and monotone! And then the poor distribution packages need to suffer.
Who cares about pkg-config and the fact that it supports cross-compilation out of the box? Just rely on custom -config scripts!
Why waste time making things work once installed at system level? They work good enough out of a repository!
Sigh.