Greetings. I would like your consideration as to whether to update Section 5.11.1 of the Developer's Reference to incorporate some of the views of Stefano Zacchiroli concerning "When and how to do an NMU". [1]
For background as to why this came up, there's recently been discussion about several packages in Debian that are quite out of date compared to upstream, including the WINE packages -- this thread starts at [2]. If you browse the 'wine' source package at [3], you can see what has transpired: there used to be several people collaborating on the wine packages, but for whatever reason it ended up being left to only one maintainer doing the work. This maintainer has stated [4] that he has time overloaded elsewhere so that he doesn't have time to work on the packages now, but simultaneously has QA requirements such that all of the older pre-1.2 wine versions must be packaged first before packaging versions 1.2 and 1.4. It seems like NMU(s) on the package(s) would be a reasonable course of action, but the current wording of Section 5.11.1 in the Developer's Reference [5] would seem to discourage this -- or at least that's how I personally interpret the current wording. This is the reason I would like to revisit this issue to see whether updating the wording in this section would be appropriate. [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/04/msg00486.html [2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/04/msg00280.html [3] http://packages.qa.debian.org/w/wine.html [4] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=585409 [5] http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/pkgs.html#nmu- guidelines Thanks. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle chris.kna...@coredump.us GPG Key: 4096R/0x1E759A726A9FDD74
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