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

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Sean Whitton writes ("Bug#904302: Whether vendor-specific patch series should be permitted in the archive"):
> I would be grateful if you would micromanage just enough that there
> isn't anything controversial left for people to disagree about :)

That seems like a generally good rule for TC decisions.  It avoids
another aspect of the same issue coming back to the TC; and it avoids
setting in stone things that haven't been thought through in the TC
context (and which are best answered by whatever the usual process
is),

In this case I don't think the details (of the transition away from
use of this feature, or the policy wording) are controversial; except
that the timetable, and the consequences at various times for a
package that still has a vendor series, might well be.

No-one seems to have proposed anything but "bug, RC after buster", but
of course opponents of the change are focusing on that and if the TC
just says "these are a bad thing" then an opponent of the change might
well reasonably say "OK I agree this is a bug but it is not RC" or "I
intend to fix this in buster+2".

So, borrowing Phil's text and editing slightly:

  1. Presence of any dpkg vendor-specific patch series is a bug for
     packages in the Debian archive (including contrib and non-free).
     Such a bug should be considered release critical, but not until
     after the release of Buster.

The consequences for what to write in policy, want to do in lintian,
how the release team should handle these bugs, etc., all follow
clearly from that text, except for implementaion details that can be
thrashed out in the relevant fora.

I changed "use of [the] feature" to "presence of [the] series" to
avoid the possibility that someone would disingenuously argue that a
series.ubuntu file, in a package in Debian, is not "use" of the
feature.

Ian.

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