Hi, See comment below,
On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 8:13 PM, <n...@we.make.ritual.n0.is> wrote: > > Hi, > > I've seen you as the last person commiting to netcat-openbsd > for Debian in 2012[2]. > > I have written a package definition for netcat-openbsd for Guix. > > At Guix we don't want to maintain forks through in-tree patchsets > and avoid it whenever possible. Patches are usually for fixing > CVEs and fixing severe build problems specific to guix. > > Now this is a problem which is reflected in the thread at [0] > (discussing the netcat-openbsd package). > > Resulting from the discussion I have questions for you: > > 1. I'd like to know if Debian could merge the specific changes > applied to the OpenBSD package, available in the patches set, > into the OpenBSD GNU-linux port. > If this is not possible, could you give us the reason for it? > My impression is that at least Gentoo, Gentoo deriviates and > based systems, Archlinux, and Debian use the orig-source + > the patches tarball. > This is long overdue - my intention was to keep netcat-openbsd to track the development of the openbsd one, but it appears not happened that way. > 2. Did you try to merge more generic changes back to OpenBSD? > > From what I've seen so far, those are bug fixes and a minority > of feature fixes. > Some of them was sent, but getting few responses. > 3. There's an initial statement in the README but as many of those > are non-trivial patches, could you try and give an explanation > on why they are needed, > if they can't get merged into the Debian orig-source? > I don't treat this netcat-openbsd a full fork even if it's targeting an older revision at the moment. Also, maintaining patches are very easy using the git-buildpackage[1] tools for Debian packages. [1]https://wiki.debian.org/PackagingWithGit > > Third option I thought of, could Debian provide a tarball of > the orig-source with the patches applied, so there's no need > to conflict with systems currently pulling one or both of the > currently existing tarball. > I think it is hardly possible to provide another tarball because there's no way of doing that with current Debian infrastructure. But you can apply those patches easily using quilt[2]. In Debian, patches are applied automatically when extracting the source package using dpkg-source. [2]https://wiki.debian.org/UsingQuilt > We can apply all the patches in a way mentioned here [1], but > because we collectively maintain all the packages/source instead > of `n' specific packages per `n' specific developer(s) it would > be good in case Debian can't merge the changes to be able to > point to a reason. > For this, I ask for your permission to quote parts you give me > permission to use for, should for any reason this email > discussion not end up completely CC'ed on guix-devel. > No problem. > [0]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-06/msg00843.html > [1]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-06/msg00909.html > [2]: > http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/netcat-openbsd.git/commit/debian?id=db2b1d9a8d4644ef892f47d84606ee96598d23fb > > > thanks, > -- Best, Aron
