[conspire] Christian draws out a Sun Microsystems guy

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Tony Godshall (togo at of.net):

> One thing I do wish was that Debian package descriptions
> were just a little bit longer and included a concise description 
> as to what functional differences there are between the upstream 
> version and the debianized package.  It's frustrating to
> hear about these things in a by-the-way form.

Oh yeah.  I'm absolutely with you, on that.

Something I meant to clarify in my earlier response:  My recollection is
that the Java routines omitted by the Debian maintainers from their OO.o
1.x package were just minor enhancements of some sort in the installer
-- though I wouldn't swear to the truth of that.  It was something that
they could drop & write around, and nobody would especially miss, anyway.

> I mean I'll still use the Debian package, but it'd be nice to know
> when I install something generally what features have been removed or
> added (and doesn't make me sound like a dummy when I talk to
> non-Debian folks- "Oh, Openoffice does /what/?").

There's also the problem typified by AbiWord:  If you install package
"abiword" but fail to notice the existence of package "abiword-plugins",
you miss a _lot_.