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Re: divergence from upstream as a bug



On Sat, 2008-05-17 at 23:08 +0200, Pierre Habouzit wrote:
> On Sat, May 17, 2008 at 09:01:08PM +0000, Joey Hess wrote:
> > What if we just decide that changes made to upstream sources[1] qualify
> > as a bug?
> 
>   WTF ? What's the point of free software if we invent rules for not
> modifying them ? 

? AFAICT the point is that we feed those changes back to upstream
instead of hoarding them in the current layers of Debian changes. I
think it's a good idea.

> And well, we're in a bad posture then, because glibc
> without patches can't work. 

And what is it that makes this not a bug in upstream glibc? I know it is
a complex build but that only makes it more important that the Debian
changes are clear and unambiguous. glibc and gcc are the most complex
packages that I regularly build (ok, crossbuild) and I dread seeing the
email from incoming that a new version needs to be prepared for Emdebian
because it nearly always fails first time, despite working last time.

> Striving for minimal differences is good,
> but deciding a change is a bug ? please…

I think it is right that a change is a bug - after all, Debian builds on
a range of architectures that upstream often do not have available. When
upstream does not build on these architectures, that is a portability
bug upstream. It would catch out someone upstream if they were to try
and build the package on that arch so why not post the fix to the
upstream bug tracker?

Call it a feature enhancement if you like but it still ends up in a bug
tracker of one kind or another so might as well call it a bug IMHO.

-- 


Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/


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