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Bug#727708: upstart upstream maintenance practices



Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> writes:

> I'm attaching the full delta against upstream currently in the Ubuntu
> packaging VCS branch, for reference.  FWIW, I'm not sure which version
> you were looking at, but the current version of the Ubuntu package
> (1.11-0ubuntu1) does not include any delta against autogenerated
> autotools files (and does use dh-autoreconf).  Also FWIW, the attached
> patch includes changes not yet released to Ubuntu (actually, just an
> update to sync the packaging with the version in Debian).

Thank you for this!  That was a more thorough answer than I was expecting!

For the record, I pulled the Ubuntu patch from:

    http://patches.ubuntu.com/u/upstart/upstart_1.11-0ubuntu1.patch

linked off of the Debian PTS.  What I hadn't realized is that this patch
appears to be generated relative to the current version in Debian, which
is a different upstream release, and that explains the huge delta.  This
was just a misunderstanding on my part on how the Ubuntu patches shown on
the PTS are generated (obvious in retrospect).

> I've dissected the current delta and provided an explanation below for
> each bit, but the short answer to your question is yes: there are
> different policies for upstream vs. the Ubuntu package.  Although
> efforts are made to keep the distro delta as small as possible, changes
> are sometimes applied to the package before they're in a state that they
> can be included in upstream in the interest of expediency.

Indeed, most of this seems quite reasonable to me and the sort of thing
that makes sense to carry as a distribution patch, apart from the SELinux
change (which is stuck on the CLA).

> As for Upstart and Ubuntu being maintained "by the same project": if
> Upstart were intended to be "Ubuntu's init system", it would be
> reasonable to do all of the maintenance on a single upstream branch.
> But it was never intended to be Ubuntu's init system, but rather "the
> init system", and as there are other downstreams besides Ubuntu, care is
> taken to not embed Ubuntu-specific policy upstream.

That makes sense.  I take a different approach as upstream for my Debian
packages and try fairly hard to embed everything into the upstream release
with necessary conditionals where needed, but that's just a philosophical
approach and neither approach is inherently superior.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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