Re: Potential MBF: packages failing to build twice in a row
On Sat, Aug 05 2023, Andrey Rakhmatullin wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 05, 2023 at 08:10:35PM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
>> Debian maintainers with proper git workflows are already exporting all
>> their changes from git to debian/patches/ as one file - currently the
>> preferred form of modification of a Debian package has to be in salsa
>> and not in our archive when the changes cannot be represented as quilt
>> patches against tarballs.
> Is the gbp-pq workflow improper?
Improper? I don't know. But bad, yes.
If we ignore the decades of history -- yes I know we don't live in that
vacuum, but humor me here -- it is a weird process. We (typically) get
upstream code in git, and (typically) maintain it in git in Debian. git
already has features built in to do all this tracking, but we do this
really weird thing where we use git to store text files consisting of
diffs that, in that case, are more properly maintained in git anyhow.
I actually prefer the old source format to quilt, because I can just
maintain things in git the proper way with it, rather than have to do
all this weirdness. But that's just me.
Not all of my packages have their upstream in git, but I maintain 100%
of them in git at the Debian level.
Here's the key. By using a lot of nonstandard things, Debian is doing
two things:
1) Raising the barrier to newcomers to participate
2) Assuring that we will lag behind what others are doing
For #2, the reason is that however much we work on our bespoke tooling,
we cannot hope to match what the rest of the world combined is doing.
That doesn't mean we give up on .deb and adopt RPM or something. But,
in an ideal world, would gbp-pq need to exist? I don't think so. A
world in which it doesn't should be our target.
- John
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