Re: Recent changes in dpkg
On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 02:54:17PM +0200, Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
> ]] Neil Williams
> | You seem to think that every package is going to be uploaded just for
> | the sake of an upload.
> | There is no way to guarantee that ALL packages in Debian will be
> | uploaded again by some point in the future.
> | If a package does not need an upload - e.g. the only "issue" is an
> | ancient standards version - then dpkg cannot change behaviour in a way
> | that makes that package FTBFS.
> You make it sound like a package upload is a big deal. Sometimes, you
> upload for small things, there's nothing wrong with that.
No, he's saying that 16,000 package uploads are a big deal, which is the
number of source packages that have to be uploaded in order to complete this
transition.
I understand better Raphaël's position after the last thread - that a source
package is a .dsc + related files, not an unpacked tree, so refusing to
create a 1.0 source package out of an unpacked tree isn't a redefinition of
the format. Even so, transitions that require sourceful changes to every
single package in the archive are a bad idea, and almost always translate as
"busywork".
> | If, eventually, dpkg fails with an error when debian/source/format
> | does not exist, dpkg is causing the package to FTBFS and therefore
> | dpkg is causing an unnecessary upload due to the changed behaviour of
> | dpkg. There is A LOT wrong with that.
> How is this different to other changes in the toolchain which sometimes
> deprecate and remove functionality which then makes packages FTBFS?
Can you point to such a toolchain change that required changes to even 20%
of the packages in th archive?
--
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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