On Tue, Feb 02, 2010 at 11:12:54AM +0100, Jan Wagner wrote:
> > the usual maintainer doesn't harm so that you're sure about the
> > implications of the backport.
>
> I totally agree with you (and I think I stated this more than once in this
> recent discussion). Unfortunately my experiences in the past was often, that
> maintainers often don't care about backporting (,even of stable and old-
> stable). This is absolutly not true in general and I had also positive
> experiences here.
I understand it is difficult to draw a line here: on one hand you/we
don't want to carve in stone that without maintainer ack you shouldn't
backport (we are full of non-responsive maintainers, adding that will
block the process), on the other hand---and for the cases where
maintainers *are* responsive---it will just feel odd to receive an
"improper" backport without even a ping. I'm personally unable to draw
a generic line here, so let's just convey the message that we, debian
ocaml maintainers, welcome backports, but please drop a line before :-)
(we are usually quite reactive on #debian-ocaml for instance, see our
team page [1]).
On the other hand, about your suggestion of documenting backporting
practices in README.source, I don't think it would be appropriate. For
once, backports is not something official in Debian (at least "not yet",
whereas the recent move on the buildd front is a step in that
direction), so I don't think it would be realistic to hope maintainers
will diligently document backporting practices. Then, maintainers might
lack the appropriate knowledge on how backports work, as long as they've
never done one. Finally, README.source has currently a very specific
mean documented into the Debian policy, overloading it arbitrarily
doesn't seem a wise step to me.
As a suggestion, if you really want to push in this direction, you might
try the alternative path of suggesting people to introduce a
README.backports or such, which would be nothing official (yet?), but
which backports-sensible maintainers can start to spread. If its need
will be proved, one day it can become something officially part of DD
workflow.
Cheers.
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/Teams/OCamlTaskForce
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
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