On Wed, August 17, 2011, Carlos R. Mafra wrote: > At first I thought that the debian/ folder was something to support > the automated builds created by Martin, but now it appears that your > patches are doing what debian would do in their distro, and nobody > but debian should worry about that. > > Martin, what's your take on this? What's exactly the plan here?
I see no harm in keeping distros' build files in a software package's upstream. Actually this is something I've always liked whenever I see it. Distro maintainers will aways have to configure, sometimes also patch the software to make it fit into the respective distros. The closer that process is to development of the software, the easier this will be. Ideally the distro's maintainers should be involved in the application's development anyway. Secondly, many people like to try out software straight from the RCS. However the good thing about a distro and its package manager is having control on what's installed and what it depends on. Being able to build a package from the sources is therefore desirable. I don't see any harm from keeping distro build scripts in the upstream. As it comes to the patches, I think we should distinguish between purely distro-specific and general patches. Lots of patches coming with distros are bugfixes, they should go straight into the sources anyway rather than being patched into them when building for a distro. Other patches are supposed to make software fit into a distro's concept of where to keep what in the file system. That was mostly general stuff. If there's a long list of patches for a distro we should ask ourselves why they are for a distro only. Some distro-specific stuff might even be a good idea to adopt for the whole upstream. And the rest should be kept as sparse as possible. Cheers, M'bert -- ----------- / http://herbert.the-little-red-haired-girl.org / ------------- =+= Ya dyshu - i znachit, ya lyublyu! Ya lyublyu - i znachit, ya zhivu! -- Vladimir Vysozkij -- To unsubscribe, send mail to [email protected].
