>As the one doing a fair percentage of these uploads, here is the logic I >was given by some porters (who have done other architectures) when they >told me to do binary NMU's with a patch in the BTS. Sure. Binary-only NMUs from modified source have always been a useful technique for getting a new port off the ground, or for quickly fixing a grave but port-specific bug in an important package. But they do break the assumption that you can do "apt-get source ..; dpkg-buildpackage" to reconstruct an equivalent binary package, which could be a nuisance if there is a risk that these packages might end up in a release. It sounds like these modified binary NMUs might have become a standard modus operandi for HPPA, and this definitely isn't a precedent that ought to be set. Unless there's a real benefit to doing a binary-only upload compared to a source upload (say you changed your MANIFEST file for xfree86 and don't want to force every other arch to do a wasted recompile) it would be better to follow the documented procedure and either do a full source NMU, or just file a bug and let the maintainer upload a new package. In particular, it seems fairly inappropriate to do a modified binary NMU and mark it "urgency=low". p.
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