[Lazarus] Fwd: Build-Depends: imagemagick

[Bernd]

[forwarded another copy to the list because of mailinglist was missing
in recipients]

2012/10/8 Mattias Gaertner <nc-gaertnma at netcologne.de>:

>  That's a lot
> of work and I'm glad they do it.

The problem is the Debian packages from Debian don't do it either!

They consist of many hundred lines of convoluted unmaintained(!)
script that is trying to press every possible button the debian
packaging system provides (except the new dh overrides which would
simplify matters) (it has meta-packages and virtual packages and
versioned packages, it is using update-alternatives for no reason (who
wants to install two different ancient(!) versions of Lazarus
simultaneously?)), it is ripping apart lazarus into many small pieces
and introducing new bugs and damaging Lazarus' reputation and the only
thing it is *NOT* doing is installing all needed files where they
belong! It does not install mime types, it is trying to intstall a
default config file that does not even exist anymore, when you start
it for the first time it will complain about wrong paths and packages
installed but no .lpk files found (probably because lazarus-ide fails
to depend on lazarus-src which is *essential* for using the ide, why
did they split it in the first place?), even a simple make install
even in the current limited form would immediately give a better
install than the debs from Debian.

I would rather not see any of these half-baked and broken Debian
packages at all in any of the repositories so that no new user
accidentally installs them and then immediately comes to the
conclusion that Lazarus is completely broken and unusable because that
is exactly what currently happens when one installs Lazarus from the
Ubuntu software center.

I vote for dumping this broken and unmaintained packaging entirely and
rewrite it from scratch in a much simpler way with only two packages,
one containing everything needed for building from the command line
with lazbuild and another package containing the ide, the source and
all the rest that is needed to use the ide because this is the only
logical and natural separation that would make sense. Everything going
beyond that would be nonsense and wasted manpower.

If Lazarus and Pascal programming and Pascal units are by design
incompatible with the way how Debian is organized or how its ancient
bureaucratic policies blindly dictate and they cannot put such simple
and working packages into their Repository then so be it! It doesn't
matter! An alternative repository can be set up in one afternoon and
Debian could no longer damage the reputation of Lazarus by providing
ancient and broken packages.