Re: NMUs: Do we want to Require or Recommend DH
Hi,
On 14/05/19 at 14:30 -0400, Sam Hartman wrote:
> I think there's a fairly clear consensus emerging that it's worth having
> things to check when making a build system conversion. Looking at
> debdiff, ditherscope and reproducibility of the build all appear to be
> important things to consider in such a case.
>
> So, I think there is an emerging consensus against the idea of people
> NMUing a package simply to convert it to dh.
>
> First, I'd like to explicitly call for any last comments from people who would
> like to see us permit NMUs simply to move packages toward dh. Are there
> any cases in which such an NMU should be permitted?
Our NMU policy (Sec 5.11.1 of developers-reference[1]) tries hard to
give some standards of when and how it's acceptable to do an NMU. It is
complex, but in the end, I think that it boils down to:
NMUs are always permitted, but discouraged in some (many?) cases, and
extensive use of the DELAYED queue is recommended.
It also explicitely discourages NMUs for packaging style changes:
> Fixing cosmetic issues or changing the packaging style (e.g. switching
> from cdbs to dh) in NMUs is discouraged.
Do you want to change this and explicitely forbid NMUs for converting to
dh? I think that the current policy is quite balanced (but I'm biaised
since I contributed to its adoption a long time ago :) ). I also think
that we should trust the judgement of DDs, and that completely
forbidding some changes via NMUs would be a regression compared to the
current policy.
- Lucas
[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/ch05.en.html#nmu
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