Bug#904302: Why outlawing vendor-specific patch series would be a bad idea

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

]] Adrian Bunk 

> Hi,
> 
> looking at something where I worked on the upstream implementation ages ago:
> https://sources.debian.org/src/liferea/1.12.4-1/debian/patches/ubuntu-example-feeds.patch/
> 
> It is a common problem that users should be able to get started quickly 
> after installing a program.
> 
> When liferea is started by a user for the first time, the default feedlist
> in the locale of the user gets installed as feedlist for the user.
> 
> It is clear why a derivative, especially a brand-aware one like Ubuntu,
> wants to change this feedlist.
> 
> And it is also clear why this change cannot be applied in Debian.
> 
> One obvious solution if vendor-specific series files get outlawed in 
> Debian would be to switch from ubuntu.series to manual patching in
> debian/rules based on dpkg-vendor(1).

Or it would mean that Ubuntu would carry a XubuntuY version and do
manual (or automatic, based on whatever tooling they have available)
merges from Debian, marking it clearly as a different work.

[...]

> The whole underlying notion that there would be one source tree that 
> gets built is also flawed. This is not true in all cases, and can
> never be.

We are not talking about what's built. We're talking about what's
unpacked.  It's well understood that what's unpacked is not always
what's built; build processes can (and do) all kinds of transformations
and is understood to be executable code.

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