Re: let missing-debian-source-format lintian tag be a warning!
Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@err.no> writes:
> I can't speak for Plessy, but the entire concept of using a different,
> much more limited patch system on top of git is just.. weird. It makes
> absolutely no sense to dumb down all the rich metadata you have in your
> git repository to something that's possible to express using quilt.
> It's busywork that has very little value for anybody and a
> not-insignificant cost.
I used to feel this way, but have been slowly converting my own packages
over to use gbp pq.
The thing that made me change my mind was that I increasingly want to
share the patches, as clearly-defined, separate, upstreamable units, with
packages for other distributions and with upstream.
While it's possible to maintain artifacts in Git as used normally that
accomplish that end (such as by maintaining multiple topic branches), it's
actually quite complex and irritating, and those artifacts aren't then
exposed in the packaging system, and hence aren't readily available in
patch-tracker (when it's working). I'm uninterested in quilt per se, and
am happy not to have to use it any longer, but the debian/patches *format*
is very nice for this purpose. It exposes, as a packaging artifact,
high-quality, separated patches that can be considered and upstreamed
individually. And now that there are good tools for managing those
artifacts without giving up the general usability of Git, I've been
convinced it's worth the additional effort.
It's still more work than just merging Git branches and using
single-debian-patch, so I'm not sure if I'll ever get to the point where I
do this with all of my packages. But it has more merits than I saw
initially.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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