Re: Standardization, large scale changes, innovations

[Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>]

On Thu, 25 Mar 2010, Joey Hess wrote:
> The exciting potential of dpkg source v3 to me is that it potentially
> opens an area that had stifled most innopvation, by allowing subtypes of
> the source format to be developed. But this area is still relatively
> closed to innovation; dpkg's maintainers still need to sign off on new
> formats, and the v3 source handling in dak is AIUI unneccessarily
> limited/hardcoded to only supporting certian subtypes.

I am not opposed on merging code improvements concerning alternative
source formats and I'm not opposed to adding support for new source
formats either.

While dak needs some modification for each alternative source format to
allow, the code has been modified in ways that make it easy to add support
of supplementary source formats.

That said my personal opinion is however that we should be very cautious
before deciding to allow those alternatives formats on ftp-master. I
strongly believe that we should not have many source formats in Debian and
that the right long term approach for VCS based maintainance is not
to have the VCS in the source package but rather to generate the source
package out of the VCS. And I would rather encourage people to work in
that direction; I would like dpkg-dev to provide tools to do precisely
this but it's still far from being at the top of my TODO list currently.
Any help welcome as usual.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog

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