Re: How to cope with patches sanely
On Thu, 31 Jan 2008, Steve Langasek wrote:
No, but I think it's a *bug* that this is not the common case. If more
packages were maintained in distributed VCS, it would become practical to
consider publishing official "Debian" branches in an organized fashion,
keeping them synced with the maintainer's branch and letting NMUers push
their own changes to the Debian branch so that they're trivially mergeable
by the maintainer with full change history.
Well, I have no personal experience with other VCS than CVS and SVN
but I see some sense behind your arguing and I'm perfectly willing
to enhance my skills if I see some kind of master plan behind it
to enhance Debian in general.
This just isn't going to happen as long as svn dominates, because acls on
centralized svn repos are just too coarse-grained. Maintainers (including
me) aren't going to want their package staging areas to be randomly
scribbled on by developers they don't know, which is what opening up an svn
tree to everyone with NMU rights would allow; so that's a conversation we
can't even realistically have without the paradigm shift to DVCS.
I recently read that Linus spoke about 2000 people who are providing
code to the Linux kernel - so we are talking about the same amount of
people that finally settled down on using git (or were kind of
forced to use git if they wanted to provide code). I'm not sure
whether this is comparable (probably not) but IMHO the best way
would be to start implementing a solution and writing a brain
dead easy doc that enables even dinosaurs like me to apply this
to day to day work without taking hours to gather basic knowledge
how to use the VCS of choice.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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