Re: Of the use of native packages for programs not specific to Debian.
Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> writes:
> On Mon, Sep 07, 2009 at 11:22:30AM +0200, Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:
>> We have a lot of troubles when upstreams ship a debian/ directory
>> in upstream tarball, thus I'll expect derivatives will have similar
>> problems
>
> I don't see it that way.
>
> The reason why we have 'a lot of troubles' when upstreams ship a debian/
> directory, is because upstreams usually supply that directory as a
> courtesy to make life 'easier' for those people who want to build a
> Debian package out of their SCM repository, and that as a result, they
> are usually not even remotely Policy-compliant. Thus, we need to do a
> *lot* of work to get them integrated properly; and any files that keep
> lying around in debian/ might interfere with other things.
And that quickly goes away when upstream accepts patches that fix
their debian directory.
I don't see that as a *lot* of work at all. It just means you need a
good relationship with upstream so changes to the debian dir are
merged upstream quickly. If you have write access to upstreams RCS
then I don't see this as a problem at all.
> Debian packages from the Debian distribution usually are
> policy-compliant and maintained, so this kind of problem does not
> manifest itself as often for our downstreams
And as we were talking about packages where the debian maintainer is
also upstream this problem also doesn't manifest for Debian itself.
> (of course there are packages that are not maintained nor
> policy-compliant, but then they don't tend to live long in the
> distribution).
MfG
Goswin
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