I cross-post this thread to [email protected]. As Ralf Treinen said, this is a general question rather than an OCaml specific question.
Summary: Ralf Treinen is reviewing the OCaml packaging policy and we discussed a point about adding features to upstream package. We would like to share this discussion with other Debian packagers to know what is the best practice. Point of view 1: We can add features to upstream software. Debian goal is to deliver non-broken software and we should even improve it. It includes fixing examples, documentation and the software itself. One of the example was adding a way to detect user's locale setting which was not accepted upstream because of portability issue on Windows. Point of view 2: We should limit patches to upstream software to packaging matter: - fix the build system to make it compile on Debian - fix security bugs The benefit of this approach for a packager are: - patches only apply to things most of DD or DM know: build system for example, so it is easier for anyone to understand the meaning of patches (while adding features can be tougher to understand for newcomers) - patches are easier to maintain on the long-term - no difference of behavior for the software between Linux distributions We don't exclude doing more specific patches, but this should only be temporary and hopefully immediatly sent upstream. POV2 is a little bit more documented than POV1, because I support POV1. Maybe Ralf or others can extend POV1. Thank you for giving us your opinions/best practices/experiences about this. Regards, Sylvain Le Gall On 24-08-2010, Ralf Treinen wrote: > On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 03:19:21PM +0200, Stéphane Glondu wrote: >> Le 23/08/2010 11:13, Ralf Treinen a écrit : >> >>>> Whenever you patch the source, IMHO, you limit the patch to: >> >>>> - fix the build system to make it compile on Debian (source -> binary >> >>>> package, new OCaml version) >> >>>> - fix security bugs >> >>> >> >>> Certainly not. We do add features (I am speaking here of debian packages >> >>> in general, not only of ocaml libraries), and we fix things that are >> >>> broken. >> >> Not any feature. I would tend to agree with Sylvain on this one. It may >> cause portability issues with non-Debian users, and can make the >> packaging harder to maintain and update (see advi, for example). > > The situation with advi has improved a lot. Currently, the debian patch set > is very small. > > Besides, I do not see why we shouldn't add any feature. Of course, > we should try to cooperate with upstream and have changes integrated > upstream, but there are various reasons why this is not possible. In that > case, our priority should be the quality of the software provided by > our packages. > >> If the patch is committed upstream, then I guess it's ok to put it in >> the Debian package if it is backward compatible somehow... but still, >> care should be taken and I wouldn't do that if I wasn't following >> upstream development more than for my average package. >> >> Upstream development should be done upstream (I don't say that the >> packager should not contribute...). A package is perfect when the >> packaging is trivial and there are no patches. > > This is the ideal situation, I agree. However, there are two sides who > have to cooperate to maintain that ideal situation. > > But this is really getting off topic now. This discussion would be more > appropriate for debian-project. > -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
