Re: Of the use of native packages for programs not specific to Debian.
Wouter Verhelst wrote:
On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 07:46:08AM +0200, Giacomo A. Catenazzi wrote:
On native package the debian/changelog is also used for upstream
changelog: upstreams tend to package their packages as native.
[...]
Thus non debian specific package, which are also native,
should (must on GPL licensed packages) have a separate
"upstream" changelog.
That doesn't follow. You're assuming it's going to be impossible to keep
the original debian/changelog file, and/or that the only way to package
something that an upstream has packaged as native is to package it as
non-native.
hmm. Do you think we should pack an external package as native, if
upstream (or "upstream distribution") packages it as native?
I think this is not intended by our polict, but OTOH it is the easier
way: we should only take care about version conflicts (automatically
adding a suffix could not be enough on few seldom cases).
But if we pack as non-native (as it should be: we are not upstream),
more problems arises:
we cannot patch anymore debian directory: on 3.0 source format
the original debian dir will disappear, thus removing the
debian/changelog (which is required by GPL for upstream changes).
It is not impossible to solve this problem: we can manually copy the
original changelog to our diff/patches.
So the question is:
Is it really worth to use "native package for programs not
specific to Debian" ?
I still think it is not nice for downstream.
If I'm an upstream and a Debian maintainer for a particular package, and
a downstream distribution wants to modify my package, then I think it's
fairly reasonable for them to just modify the package, without having to
repackage it entirely.
This is the problem with sources 3.0, on non-native packages: we cannot
modify the package, we must repack discarding all original files in debian/
People fork software *all the time*. This is no different.
Yes, but it is not our job to fork packages (freely interpreted from devref 3.5).
ciao
cate
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