Colin Watson writes ("Bug#1127616: developers-reference: should document using
git-debpush to upload"):
> So sure, the situation is not ideal. But it might be worth walking a
> mile in our shoes first.
In Debian we sometimes have an unfortunate habit of trying to insist
that every maintainer must do things our way.
Obviously, there are necessary points of standardisation, so that we
(and our computers) can all work together - and in particular so that
people can work on unfamiliar packages. These currently include the
BTS, and the archive, and since 2013 they also include *.dgit.d.o.
But the tasks we have set ourselves are vast and diverse. The people
doing those tasks often have good reasons for divergence.
For this reason I think it's quite important that:
1. We make good recommendations that are usually applicable.
(This applies both in formal documents like devref, and in
less official contexts like this mailing list discussion.)
2. But these must be *recommendations*, not mandates.
3. We should be very slow to use tools like MBFs, linter warnings,
and NMUs, to try to get everyone to adopt our recommendations.
On the question of upstream tarballs vs upstream git, devref
definitely needs to mention both approaches. I'm firmly of the
opinion that upstream git should be the preferred recommendation.
But Colin's catalogue of situations where that doesn't work well is
not unexpected! It shows why this must be a *recommendation* that a
package, or a whole team, might reasonably choose to diverge from.
Thanks,
Ian.
--
Ian Jackson <[email protected]> These opinions are my own.
Pronouns: they/he. If I emailed you from @fyvzl.net or @evade.org.uk,
that is a private address which bypasses my fierce spamfilter.
