On Fri, 20 Feb 2015 19:31:49 +0100 Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> wrote: > On Fri, Feb 20, 2015 at 05:53:27PM +0000, Simon McVittie wrote: > > If the Debian packages are not as good as the upstream ones, such > > that you end up having to use the upstream ones for some reason, > > then that also seems like a bug. If you can help the Debian > > maintainer to fix that bug (e.g. by getting newer upstream versions > > into experimental, or by fixing deficiencies of the packaging that > > are done better upstream, or whatever), problem also solved. > > There's only one experimental, the upstream can have more branches. If the will is there, packages which would be suitable for experimental (with a rebuild/re-signing) can be pushed to an upstream repo - yes, you lose the benefits of mirrors and buildds etc. but it can work and it's not an excuse for making "bad" packages or packages which fail to inter-operate with the versions already in Debian. > During Debian freeze, an upstream may offer for example: > * the newest release > * upcoming beta branch > * trunk > > Another reason is that the latter two will often have nightly builds. > You can't expect a Debian maintainer to make uploads to experimental > daily, while it's easy for an upstream script to do that. .. and the upstream script can just as easily put the package into a suitable repository which is easy to use with apt-pinning. There aren't many users who will upgrade the same package every day either, so it's not as if the lack of mirrors is going to be much of a problem. Echoing Simon's response - in all reasonable cases, there are steps that upstream and Debian can take so that their packages use the same package names and work nicely with together - that includes working with the Debian versions of the same upstream. The technical issues can be fixed with bug reports. It's only if there is a particularly toxic social relationship between Debian and upstream that a package could warrant being renamed to actively conflict with the name used upstream. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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