Dear Kalle, I am only a Debian Elinks user, and occasionally contribute; Giridhar and Moritz Mühlenhoff should probably make the decisions, but here are my comments anyway.
On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 08:04:47PM +0300, Kalle Olavi Niemitalo wrote: > As reported at <http://bugzilla.elinks.cz/show_bug.cgi?id=1117>, > contrib/debian/elinks.desktop is in a pre-standard format that > triggers a warning from the mimeo program. I could easily fix > that in the upstream elinks sources; however, Debian already has > an up-to-date elinks.desktop file that also includes translations > to a few languages. To avoid needless forking, I'd like to copy > that version to the elinks-0.12 branch and later merge to master. This sounds fair. > Then, to keep authorship information, I think I should also copy > debian/changelog, and perhaps the rest of the debian directory. > According to <http://bugzilla.elinks.cz/show_bug.cgi?id=988>, the > Debian maintainer does not want us to have a debian/ directory in > the ELinks sources, so the files would go in contrib/debian/. > Does that seem reasonable to do? This is primarily because the Debian packaging provided by upstreams is usually not compliant with the ideas and standards required or imposed by the Debian maintainers themselves. However, in case you are merely going to ship the currently up-to-date debian/ directory, I can see two ways where you can do so without hurting the Debian maintainers: - Just ship the debian/ directory and don't make changes to it, or make only those changes which the Debian maintainers would make anyway, and/or - Become a co-maintainer of the Debian package. If these aren't suitable to you (and the Debian maintainers), then an alternate solution would be necessary. > Also, should I make the commit a merge (from > git://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/elinks.git#debian/unstable), > or would that just complicate later Debian maintenance? I don't see why a merge would complicate things, although Moritz and Giridhar can comment further on their paradigm on packaging. > I suppose another solution would be to move elinks.desktop out of > contrib/debian/ and update AUTHORS accordingly. It does look a > bit odd that the Arch Linux build script reads a file from a > Debian-specific directory. This is a possible solution, but this does seem like unnecessary duplication. From my perspective, if you maintain the debian directory in a way where the debian maintainers can pull it in and use it with overlaid changes, I don't see the need to move it out of the way. Moritz, Giridhar: please correct me if I am wrong. Thanks from a happy Elinks user! Kumar -- Kumar Appaiah _______________________________________________ elinks-dev mailing list elinks-dev@linuxfromscratch.org http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/elinks-dev
