Re: Integration of debian/ scripts in packages
On Sat 09 Jun 2001 18:24, Theodore Tso wrote:
> Well, e2fsprogs certainly isn't done that way, and the New
> Maintainer's Guide doesn't discuss this technique at all.
>
> One of the reasons why I wasn't particularly happy with Debian a
> number of years ago (and recommended a large number of people not to
> use it) was when I discovered that a large number of changes were
> being made to e2fsprogs, and they were all in one single .diff file,
> so it was a real pain in the *ss to figure out what the heck was going
> on.
>
> When the .diff file gets that's big, it becomes to hard to track what
> bugs are the upstream's maintainer, and which ones were introduced by
> the Debian specific maintainer. And when a bug introduced by debian
> is forwarded to the author, either by the Debian maintainer because he
> doesn't realize it was caused by one of his changes, or by end-users,
> and when the upstream author has to paw through kilobytes and
> kilobytes of patch file to try to figure out what's going on, it's
> very easy for the upstream author to become.... irritable.
Well, I'd propose to make an addition to Policy and/or NM Guide:
"Please note that in order to separate changes to the upstream sources for
Debian-only issues and bug-fixing issues, we (strongly?) recommend to
maintain an isolated set of patches only related to fix things not present in
upstream sources.
In such way, adopting an orphaned package become easier (the new maintainer
will know very fast the changes made to the upstream sources), and the
upstream author could know what are the changes that Debian maintainer is
doing to the software."
What do you think?
Sincerely,
Ender.
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