Re: divergence from upstream as a bug
Pierre, please fix your MUA to honour the request I made earlier: stop
sending individual copies of messages that you also send to the Debian
lists. It's a request in the mailing list guidelines, and I've
explicitly pointed it out earlier.
Pierre Habouzit <madcoder@debian.org> writes:
> On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 09:57:02AM +0000, Ben Finney wrote:
> > Pierre Habouzit <madcoder@debian.org> writes:
> >
> > > That's why the proposal is bad. It doesn't improve that, and
> > > it requires more work from the maintainer. Lose/lose situation.
> >
> > As I understand it, the proposal is to put *new* information (that
> > Debian source diverges, and exactly why) into an existing location
> > that is already a place we expect upstream to know about (the
> > Debian BTS) and that all Debian package maintainers are already
> > expected to know how to use.
>
> But it's NOT ABOUT Debian package maintainers.
You seem to contradict yourself; in the earlier message I quoted
above, *you* raised the issue of "requires more work from the
maintainer". I was responding directly to that point. If you don't
think the effect on maintainers is relevant, I don't see why you
raised it in the first place.
> More administrivia is never an improvement. See (yeah I know it's
> always about the glibc, but well … that's a very good example for the
> discussion) in the glibc we have
> debian/patches/$arch/$state-$subject.patches. For $state in
> {submitted,local,cvs}. submitted means its sent upstream, local means
> that it's not, cvs that it's a cherry-pick from upstream. Why on earth
> would we need to write that in _yet another place_ ?
Again, the BTS is not "yet another place"; it's already a place where
Debian-specific information needs to be about other changes to the
package. It's a proposal to *consolidate* information into a place
that already has much similar information for similar purposes,
instead of having that information scattered in many places.
> What Joey's proposal is:
> * put more burden on the maintainers that already report patch
> upstream ;
Are these maintainers not recording the fact of a bug in the BTS?
> * has very few advantages for people that already did that work in
> their source package in a decent enough way (like the glibc does):
> the sole advantage I see is that it's predictable where to find the
> information. But when you want to check a package you have to
> `apt-get source` it anyways, and if debian/patches is sorted
> properly, then you'll see that in an obvious way before even
> launching your browser to look at the BTS.
This assumes that 'debian/patches' is a known standard interface for
all Debian packages, which I would think it clearly isn't in light of
previous threads here. The Debian BTS, on the other hand, *is* a known
standard interface for all Debian packages.
--
\ "I busted a mirror and got seven years bad luck, but my lawyer |
`\ thinks he can get me five." -- Steven Wright |
_o__) |
Ben Finney
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