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

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@debian.org>]

On Wed, Sep 19, 2018 at 02:39:23PM +0200, Philip Hands wrote:
>...
>   The Committee therefore resolves that:
> 
>   1. Any use of dpkg's vendor-specific patch series feature is a bug for
>      packages in the Debian archive (including contrib and non-free),

This misses an important part of the previous proposal:

  The Committee recognises that there is a need for packages to behave
  differently when built on different distributions, but this should be
  done as part of the build process, using current and future practices
  such as patches with conditional behaviour, patching of files during the
  build, rather than at source unpacking time.

Otherwise it might sound as if any kind of vendor-specific patching 
would be no longer be allowed in the Debian archive.

>      however existing use of this feature in packages should not be
>      considered release critical until after the release of Buster.
>...

We might disagree whether or not the whole change is a good idea, but if
it is done I do not see any good reason for waiting until after the
release of buster.

Policy should in any case provide guidance what replacement for 
vendor-specific patching during the build is recommended instead.

With only 18 packages, submitting 18 RC bugs with patches switching them 
to the replacement should then be doable immediately.

> Cheers, Phil.

cu
Adrian

-- 

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