Re: Who to contact about pointless Ubuntu differences?
On Wednesday 05 March 2008 03:44, Steve Langasek wrote:
> 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.
Definitely. I'll upload a new revision removing this gratuitous difference
and leave a note to make clear it's appropriate to sync the package.
Scott K
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