From: Yann Dirson <ydirson@altern.org>
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:55:24 GMT
Subject: Re: [StGit] Debian packaging update
Message-ID: <20080828195524.GI4985@nan92-1-81-57-214-146.fbx.proxad.net>
In-Reply-To: <20080828191625.GA17955@khazad-dum.debian.net>

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 04:16:25PM -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Aug 2008, Karl Hasselström wrote:
> > On 2008-08-28 11:09:29 -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> > > Whatever people told you guys, the sad truth is that for the
> > > overwhelming majority of packages, the mere presence of a debian/
> > > dir upstream is taken as a warning sign by any seasoned Debian
> > > developer (i.e. it is so often a problem, we take it as a bad sign).
> > > It almost never helps. I have no idea where stgit is in that regard,
> > > though. And I have NOT checked the "upstream version of the Debian
> > > packaging", so please don't take this personally.
> > >
> > > But I can tell you that most DDs would prefer that upstream dumped
> > > the debian/ dir, unless it is kept *really* current. And really, at
> > > that point, you are losing a lot of the benefits of a downstream
> > > maintainer anyway (i.e. you are not delegating the whole issue to
> > > him, so that you can ignore the packaging and just pay attention to
> > > stgit itself).
> > >
> > > Of course, this changes a lot when upstream is also a Debian
> > > developer and spends a few hours per week keeping up-to-date with
> > > Debian policy and toolset changes, etc.
> > 
> > So the optimal solution if we want to carry a debian/ directory (to
> > allow users to easily build their own .debs, or whatnot) would maybe
> > be to simply politely ask our Debian maintainer to send us patches or
> > pull requests to keep it up-to-date?
> 
> Yes, but that assumes you release often.  Otherwise users get an old
> version of the packaging all the time.

Well, stgit does not require so much packaging change for each
release.  The current debian/ dir in the git repo, while not 100%
uptodate, still allows anyone to build snapshots.

Best regards,
-- 
Yann