Quoting Steve Langasek (vorlon@debian.org): (following up on Steve's mail but that's more a summary of my own feelings about this topic) > Fundamentally, I don't think that's a responsible decision for the dpkg > maintainers to make. You're making busywork for maintainers, and conflict > for yourself, by insisting on this when there's no technical reason it > should be the case. > > If what you care about is the format used by *new* packages, I think you > should focus on making sure the templates maintainers are using (such as > dh-make) set the desired default explicitly. That would have an *immediate* > payoff, unlike trying to change the implicit default, which involves a lot > of work for a very small payoff in the distant future (i.e.: make all the > developers manually add this file now so that, at some point when all > packages have the file, the default can be changed and a different set of > packages can remove the file again). I'm surprised by the resistance I see to these changes. I see the approach pushed by dpkg maintainers as fairly conservative with very progressive changes to existing packages and much respect for people who don't want to adopt the "new" source format. The currently debated change is to kindly suggest to maintainers who prefer sticking with 1.0 source format to mention this explicitely in their source tree. I really fail to see what is the burden in this. I very much doubt that dpkg maintainers want maintainers do a new upload of their packages *just for this*. The point of this discusion was, IIRC, to find the most appropriate way to add something to lintian as a reminder to people that explicitely mentioning that the package's source format is 1.0 could be a good idea. What seems to have converged as of now (Russ' last proposal) seems to be a good compromise. As a frequent NMUer, I've decided to add that debian/source/format to packages I'm NMUing. I don't see any rational argument to oppose this. Of course, I will *not* switch packages to source v3 in NMUs. Just explicitely mention that package <foo> is using v1.0. The next debate to have will come when it's time to change the default behaviour of dpkg-source. That debate has been mixed into the current discussion and is probably what makes it quite hairy.... It is very obviously controversial to decide when to change the default behaviour of such a key tool and I think that dpkg maintainers are probably slightly wrong to say that *they* will change the default at some moment in the future. Such decision probably belongs to a wider audience than dpkg maintainers (no matter how wise they are) and I think it would make a perfect topic for the CTTE (after all, you guys have nothing to do..:-))....of course with the dpkg maintainers (who are those doing the hard work). But, definitely IMHO, having as many packages as possible to carry an explicit information about the source format they want to use will be a great help in such a decision. An, unless I'v emisunderstood the current discussion, I don't really see any problem in this.
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