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

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

Adrian Bunk writes ("Bug#904302: Whether vendor-specific patch series should be permitted in the archive"):
> 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:

I think Phil was just intending to leave the recitals part alone, and
proposing only a change to the operative part - not to delete the
recitals.

>   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.

However, now that we are talking about the recitals I would like to
suggest that the recitals should include *maintaining different source
packages in different distributions* as one of the suggested options.

IMO it is far superior to patches which are conditional (at runtime or
at build-time) on dpkg-vendor and I would not like to see that
perpetuated.

Ian.