Bug#904302: Whether vendor-specific patch series should be permitted in the archive

[Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@err.no>]

]] Sean Whitton 

> The concrete question that I am asking the committee to decide, in my
> capacity as a Policy delegate, is whether or not vendor-specific patch
> series should be permitted in the Debian archive.
> 
> There is a broader question of whether source packages should be allowed
> to unpack differently on different systems through other means, such as
> patch systems implemented in debian/rules (this could be done using
> dpkg-vendor(1)).  But given that 3.0 (quilt) is now dominant, you might
> leave this broader question aside.

I agree with Ian, Steve, and Colin that it is rather surprising for
source packages to unpack differently on a different OS.  Source
packages are (at least to most people) a transport format; not entirely
unlike tar, and those do in general not have the property that the
unpacking OS matters.  My understanding is also that vendor series are
mostly used by Ubuntu and the experience that Colin and Steve have is
that they are mostly used for the wrong reasons, and cause at least as
many problems as they solve.

I think we should disallow vendor-specific patch series in Debian, and
ask the dpkg developers to kindly deprecate the functionality given the
mentioned concerns.

As for the wider question about patch systems operating through
debian/rules, I'm a lot more comfortable allowing that since you then
run code to get to the patches-applied source code.  (I think it's a bad
idea with patches-unapplied packages, but there are use cases for it,
and not all bad ideas should be outlawed.)

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are