Re: Debian Policy 4.1.4.0 released
Hi,
Sean Whitton wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 02 2018, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
>> I'm a bit confused: wasn't it already specified pretty precisely?
>
> Please take a look through the bug's discussion. It's explained why the
> wording was not thought to be good enough.
Thanks. This looks like a classic case of letting the perfect be the
enemy of the good (or perhaps, of not understanding the use case for
which the existing practice was good enough). Some quotes from the
bug:
| According to codesearch.d.n, get-orig-source is implemented by less than
| 3000 source packages. This is not very low, but neither a high adoption
| rate. It certainly makes using get-orig-source somewhat useless on a
| distribution-scale.
Certainly it's even more useful to have a debian/watch file, but this
doesn't make it clear to me what I'm supposed to do with those 3,000
source packages now.
| * The requirement that get-orig-source may be invoked from any
| directory is difficult to fulfil and often times not implemented. A
This hasn't been an obstacle to my use. I can even try multiple
directories. What's helpful for me is that it works from *somewhere*.
| * It is not clear whether the most recent upstream version or the
| currently packaged version should be downloaded.
Likewise, either works fine for my use.
| * It is not clear where required tools should be declared.
As long as the command prints an error about the required tool, I can
install it.
| We're just reducing
| the documented interfaces of packages a bit based on current trends,
| which is useful for newcomers to Debian.
What is a newcomer supposed to do now when they encounter a package
that does not provide an explanation of how to generate the upstream
tarball?
Jonathan
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