On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 09:11:11PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote: > There isn't even a guarantee that what gets synced to Ubuntu has ever > been unpacked - or *can* be unpacked - with dpkg-source.
Indeed. Not only is there no guarantee, but it goes wrong in practice too. As an operator of merges.ubuntu.com, I run into this from time to time, because that service's daily operation involves unpacking all new versions of source packages and generating diffs from previous versions (yes, this predates attempts to get everything into consistent version control). When that service encounters a source package that simply can't be unpacked, it bombs out and an operator (i.e. me) has to deal with it. Fortunately this is not very common overall, but I've definitely seen a few cases where a source package could be unpacked on Debian but not on Ubuntu due to the use of an outdated vendor series file that was allegedly there specifically for Ubuntu's benefit. And that's leaving aside the related cases where a patch accidentally got omitted from Ubuntu because a maintainer forgot that they needed to update both series files (there's no #include mechanism - see #632305/#632313). It's not surprising to me that this happens, because the tooling for dealing with these files is IME not particularly good. You basically have to point quilt at a different series file and manually refresh a separate stack, and you have to remember to do that whenever you make any substantial change to the rest of the patch stack. Of course developers sometimes forget to do that, especially if they weren't the ones who introduced the ubuntu.series file in the first place. And given that these generally represent poorly-factored patches in any case in the ways that Steve and others have pointed out, I don't think it's a good use of time to try to improve the tooling. I second Steve's opinion that, in the aggregate, this feature is actively harmful to downstreams (notwithstanding some individual cases where it may be locally helpful) and should be removed. -- Colin Watson [[email protected]]
