On Tue, Apr 19, 2011 at 09:43:45PM -0400, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote: > On Thu, 07 Apr 2011, Jan Hauke Rahm wrote: > > > No. Simply answer the question: Is this VCS used by derived distros, > > > too? If not, it's Debian only. Two examples: The git repository for > > > apt-mirror is used only for Debian (there's only the master branch). The > > > git repository for vlc is used for Debian and Ubuntu (master branch for > > > Debian sid, squeeze branch for Debian squeeze, ubuntu branch for Ubuntu > > > natty, maverick branch for Ubuntu maverick, and so on). > > And why would we care? We keep track of what we do. Anyone else may use > > it or leave it. > > In an ideal world of mine, for any package I maintain I would have > all interesting repositories linked to: upstream, Debian packaging, > popular distribution X, Y, Z packaging etc. This way I could easily > track the software life outside of upstream->Debian pipe so I could > improve "Debian" side by possibly rapidly reacting to bugs/fixes > introduced elsewhere and haven't reached upstream yet, but already > included in X, Y, Z. I can only encourage you to do so. Everything (almost :)) that makes your packages, and thus Debian, better is a good thing. > So, altogether, the idea of having more than Debian + upstream VCS > fields is sound to me. Approach/Implementation is being discussed > elsewhere in this thread. The problem now is imo that if we (as in Debian) were to put whatever kind of tracking fields in our packages that relate to "popular" distributions, we are making a statement. You, as a maintainer, can of course collect as much information from anywhere, and you have the right to only collect such from "popular" distributions. I don't think Debian should do that, though, since Debian would then single out projects as more worth looking at than others. In our qa infrastructure, we already acknowledge that Ubuntu has become sort of the biggest derivative of Debian. That's enough. There are projects (such as vcs-pkg) that try to make collaboration between distributions easier and I think that's where we can collect information that can help maintainers. I'd appreciate action on that part but not in debian/control. (And if any such project would implement some $clever technique that would allow easy tracking of what others do, we might consider making use of that in Debian, instead of changing each and every package once a derivative becomes "popular".) Hauke -- .''`. Jan Hauke Rahm <jhr@debian.org> www.jhr-online.de : :' : Debian Developer www.debian.org `. `'` Member of the Linux Foundation www.linux.com `- Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe www.fsfe.org
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