Code review comment for lp:~kirkland/ubuntu-dev-tools/612267

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 6:35 PM, Iain Lane <email address hidden> wrote:
> I'm concerned that this was merged when there was no consensus for it. After something is in, there's not much incentive to try and move it elsewhere. See how bad we've been at moving our other scripts out into more appropriate places.

Fair enough. I'm CC'ing ubuntu-devel@ now, as I think it's a
discussion that would benefit our development community, outside of a
merge proposal thread.

> Dustin, can you at least contact Joey and see if he'd have errno in moreutils?
>
> btw, this is not to denigrate your efforts in writing the tool in any way — I'm sure everyone is grateful to you for doing so. :)

Right, so I'm happy to send the tool to Joey -- I honestly don't care
where it lives. I just want it to be useful to as many developers, as
soon as possible. With the "as soon as possible" having a slightly
higher priority than "as many developers", in my mind. Whereas I can
get this into Ubuntu today and benefit a lot of users tomorrow, it
would probably take me several weeks (or months!) to get the same code
into Debian, and then Ubuntu.

I have a more general concern though...

It would be natural at this point to say at this point, "This sure
isn't worth the hassle...I'll just go back to /home/kirkland/bin,
thank you." But I'm an experienced Ubuntu coredev, upstream
developer, easy going person, and I think I have pretty thick skin.

We have some initiatives right now, trying to make it easier for
people to get new applications into Ubuntu, and the Ubuntu Software
Center. This is merely a 10-line, GPL'd shell script, and most
developers agree on its usefulness. But the experience of giving this
code away for the benefit of others is less than ideal. I'm happy to
persevere, push it to the right place, do the right thing. But will
the next aspiring developer who wants to share a small, useful hack
bother themselves with the process?

:-Dustin