[tor-talk] TorBirdy patches for Mozilla Thunderbird

[adrelanos]

intrigeri:
> Hi,
> 
> adrelanos wrote (29 Jul 2013 10:51:10 GMT) :
>> intrigeri:
>>> which easily explains why nobody
>>> ever asked the Iceweasel maintainers to apply them.
> 
>> I understand, that the Iceweasel maintainers are not interested to add them.
> 
> It's not about being *interested* (which is purely about feelings).
> 
> It's about taking responsibility to maintain patches outside of the
> area / usecases / codebase where they were meant to be used (that is,
> effectively committing to do more work).

Responsibility is indeed a good term. Interest is valid as well. You
only take responsibility for things you're interested in, right? Anyhow,
I am not accusing people for not being interested. Their behavior is
perfectly fine, no criticism here.

>>> Finding someone with the right set of skills and enough free time to
>>> actually do this work would be a great way to help. Interested?
> 
>> I'd be interested, but that task appears too difficult and obscure to me.
> 
> For the record, I was not suggesting you would do this work yourself:
> my "Interested?" was about the *finding someone* part :)

Okay. :)

>>> So, in the current
>>> state of things, this policy of Debian's is simply not applicable, and
>>> irrelevant as far as the Torbrowser is concerned.
> 
>> I have a quite different viewpoint here. There are people willing to
>> contribute, but no one able to do it as policy dictates. Policy is
>> blindly enforced while saying "for security reasons".
> 
> I'm curious what policy you're talking about.

Answered in my reply to Lunar.

> (I've taken the liberty to ignore the part about people "blindly"
> doing things, assuming you were neither referring to something that
> happened for real, nor meaning to be offensive to actual people.)

I stand by it, this is stubborn case. An oxymoron. It would be quite
difficult and time consuming to write up the full story, with enough
references who said what where. Including examples, where Mozilla has
shown disinterest and so forth, since everything can be questioned and
this is a complex story. Also writing it in a way, so no one gets
offended. Be rest assured, this isn't meant to be offensive, its about
getting the task done and I regard being offensive as counter productive
to the goal. I wasn't motivated to write it up, because I am not
convinced, that is has a chance to change anything and being right
alone, isn't worth much. If people in position to make the decision
maintain "No change to the no code duplication policy. Never. Ever. No
matter how good the reasons are. Nothing what could cause more work for
anyone. Who cares about Tor Browser.", it's no good use of time to
invest a lot time to come up with the arguments.

>> Flexibility is the bottleneck here.
> 
> If flexibility is the bottleneck, and manpower is not, I'm more than
> happy! Then, please enlighten me: how could Debian, as an
> organization, be more flexible on the Torbrowser topic, in a way that
> doesn't imply additional work for current Debian contributors?

I think any new package will add some more work for current Debian
contributors. Of course, exceptions in policy will do so as well.

Make exceptions to the "no code duplications policy" if there are really
good reasons.

> Since we're moving out of the tor-talk topic into "learning how Debian
> works", perhaps this should be taken off-list at some point...

Sure, if this topic really is off topic. Thanks again for your continued
education efforts.