Re: Who to contact about pointless Ubuntu differences?
Hi Russ,
On Tue, Mar 04, 2008 at 11:26:02PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Does anyone know the right contact point to ask Ubuntu to stop making
> pointless changes to a Debian package? See:
> http://patches.ubuntu.com/x/xfonts-jmk/xfonts-jmk_3.0-16ubuntu1.patch
> I mailed the person listed in the changelog entry here and pointed out
> that there's no reason to patch a spec file for an Ubuntu or Debian
> package and didn't get any reply, and then when I uploaded another new
> version of the package, this pointless change was blindly merged again.
Ugh...
Well, one of the changes mentioned in the changelog is to "Update maintainer
field in debian/control." Based on the outcome of the poll conducted on
(IIRC) debian-project a while back, any modified package in Ubuntu is
supposed to have a maintainer field that points at the responsible party in
Ubuntu. In this case:
-Maintainer: Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>
+Maintainer: Ubuntu MOTU Developers <ubuntu-motu@lists.ubuntu.com>
+XSBC-Original-Maintainer: Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>
So I would suggest contacting ubuntu-motu@lists.ubuntu.com. Anyone on the
MOTU team can do an upload to clean up this gratuitous diff so that the next
time it comes up for merge it will be more obvious that it should be synced
across instead.
> It doesn't really matter -- it's not hurting anything -- but it's vaguely
> annoying to have the patch keep showing up on the PTS page when there's no
> useful content (and it obscures any actually useful modifications made in
> Ubuntu).
When there are gratuitous diffs between Ubuntu and Debian, it wastes time of
both the Debian and Ubuntu developers in tracking the differences and makes
patches.ubuntu.com less useful for everyone. Better to spend the time now
to eliminate the unnecessary diff than to have it show up repeatedly down
the line.
Cheers,
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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