Re: Questions about "Winding down my Debian involvement"
Hi Jonathan,
[sorry for frequently breaking the thread - I'm answering to web-archive]
On Wed, 20 Mar 2019 Jonathan Dowland wrote:
> Imagine you had a team that,
> within the team, had standardised on (say) SVN and cdbs. Whenever that
> team picked up a new package, they then used SVN and cdbs for it:
> because that was then consistent for the packages within the team.
That was the Debian Med team until some point in time - very simple to
imagine. :-)
However, long long time ago some team members were asking for acceptance
to use Git in favour of SVN. The policy of the team was not to stop
engaged packagers who want to use more modern tools. Since a long time
we allowed SVN and Git as VCS. I even myself used both options
depending from the type of package. After the decision for Gitlab I
converted probably more than 250 packages from SVN to Git. I did the
same for several packages in Debian Science team (which also permitted
SVN and Git).
The move from cdbs to dh was done several years ago. When we have put
cdbs into our team policy it was a great enhancement. The conversion to
dh was usually pretty simple. The only reason to stick to cdbs was if
some language specific build system was relying on this. For instance
GNU R packages were build using a cdbs helper. However, once the helper
was ported to dh we re-uploaded all GNU R packages (now in the r-pkg
team).
What I want to express is: Packaging is not a static thing and tools
move on. A functional team should be able to adapt and modernise the
used techniques. Packages usually need to be adapted to new
Standards-Versions and new tools (like gcc versions, Python3 etc.) So
usually there are several good reasons to re-upload packages and when
doing so a (working) team has good reason to review the packaging
techniques.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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