Re: kernel-image-2.2.1-netwinder -- notes

[Jim Pick <jim@jimpick.com>]

Philip Blundell <philb@gnu.org> writes:

> Hi Jim,
> 
> >Hmm.  I wonder if you should have made an NMU for this?  It might have
> 
> Incidentally, at the risk of revealing my abject ignorance of matters 
> concerning the Debian project, what's an NMU? :-)

NMU = Non-Maintainer Upload

That's what we call it when a maintainer other than the regular one
for the package uploads new source.  The porting teams tend to do a
lot of these, because they need small patches to get the packages to
compile.  Sometimes NMUs are made to fix security bugs, or when the
regular maintainer is on vacation or too busy.

The policy for doing NMUs is to affix a ".1" (or .2, .3, etc.) to the
revision number of the package, and to file a bug report explaining
the changes.  The real maintainer can then choose to incorporate the
changes in the next release.

One has to be careful when doing NMUs to make sure the changes are
minimal and don't affect the other ports - otherwise the real
maintainers tend to get mad when they are swamped with bug reports for
something they didn't do.

Cheers,

 - Jim