Re: New README.source documentation for Debian packages
Daniel Leidert <daniel.leidert.spam@gmx.net> writes:
> *Only* if the build system differs, people should put additional
> comments into README.source. I could at least agree to force people to
> make a comment like
>
> "[..] This package use (quilt|dpatch). ...
> ... read /usr/share/doc/(dpatch|quilt)/README.source [..]."
>
> or similar to this file *if* they use additional tools, so other
> maintainers don't need to waste time to find out, which systems are
> used. But to be honest, even this sentence is IMHO a waste of time,
> because maintainers should be able to figure this out within a minute if
> there is nothing unusual.
The reason why the proposal calls for creating such a one-line file even
for common patch systems such as quilt or dpatch is that people disagree
about what constitutes "common" (what about dbs? yada?) and it's better
to have a consistent rule that one can easily follow. It's also slightly
faster to verify this way, not that the package is using quilt, but that
it's using quilt in the completely standard way (I've seen some packages
that use quilt but don't put the series file in debian/patches, for
instance, or expect different quilt options than the ones most packages
use). This makes all the possible variations explicit.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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