Re: Of the use of native packages for programs not specific to Debian.

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:

> Charles Plessy:
>> At least one of the consequences of being native is that the package gets all
>> its gettext and manpages translations for free from Debian. In the case of
>> programs like ikiwiki [..]
>
> AFAIK, any translator from Debian who has translated ikiwiki's gettext
> or underlays (no man page translations ever contributed) has done so in 
> the knowledge that it is not specific to Debian.
>
> Gunnar Wolf:
>> Do you want to throw stones in the way of Debian derivatives by being unable
>> to do packaging-specific changes while keeping track of your upstream
>> releases? 
>
> I see our most modification-happy derivative, Ubuntu, frequently modify
> native packages, with apparent success.
>
> I've never seen them or anyone reach for debhelper's --ignore flag, but
> it is there in case there is some file in debian/ that the derivative does
> not want used.

I also would rather have a native package in Debian and then have
Debian derivatives convert the package using Debians tar.gz as
orig.tar.gz and put their derivate specific changes into diff.gz.

Shipping a source with 0 byte diff.gz in Debian seems stupid and
shipping a all of debian/ as diff.gz in Debian means the changes
derivatives do get lost in a huge diff. Seems to me like a native
package in Debian and non-native in a derivative is the best way.


Now that all changes with the 3.0 formats. Then the could have:

upstream.tar.gz
debian.tar.gz
derivative.diff.gz

or

upstream.tar.gz
derivative.diff.gz

That makes native or non-native in Debian equaly usefull to get
changes back from derivatives. It is just a matter of making their
build scripts build the right source packages. Something Debian could
help teach dpkg-source.

MfG
        Goswin