Re: Accepting / adopting DEP-14
On Wed, 26 Aug 2020 at 16:00:02 +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> DEP-14 includes a renaming of default branch, and even if it suggests
> using "debian/master" instead, it is explicitly not strict about that
> but suggests alternatively using "debian/unstable" or "debian/sid"
> instead.
Consider the case where you have newer versions in experimental (for
example src:dbus).
One possible workflow is to consider unstable to be Debian's focus of
development, and have your shared git repo's HEAD ("default branch"
in Gitlab) always be the one for unstable, with a non-default branch
for experimental, like I do in src:dbus. So you have:
- HEAD = debian/master or debian/sid or debian/unstable:
latest "sufficiently stable" version targeting unstable
- non-default branch debian/experimental, if present:
latest experimental version, if newer than unstable
If you want to avoid the word "master", then DEP-14 is fine for the
model used in src:dbus: you can choose to use debian/sid or
debian/unstable instead.
The other possible workflow is to have the shared git repo's HEAD
always track the absolute latest thing available, for example in
src:gnome-desktop3 (some other members of the GNOME team strongly prefer
this way round so I've gone along with that). So you have:
- HEAD = debian/master:
absolute latest version, whether suitable for unstable or not
- non-default branch debian/sid or debian/unstable, if present:
latest "sufficiently stable" version targeting unstable, if
that's older than the absolute latest
In this model, the name of the "latest thing" branch has to be something
suite-neutral, because it oscillates between targeting unstable or
targeting experimental according to upstream's release cycle, so neither
debian/unstable nor debian/experimental would make sense. It needs to be
something that doesn't refer to a suite. The only thing DEP-14 currently
offers for this situation is debian/master, which is not so good if you
want to avoid the word "master".
Possible answers to that are:
- pick a word other than "master", e.g. "latest" or "devel"
- probably best not "main" because that already has a different meaning
- recommend against that workflow
Vaguely related: for people using suite names, it would probably be
good for consistency if DEP-14 expressed a weak preference for either sid
or unstable, since those two names are permanently equivalent. For what
it's worth, debian/changelog traditionally calls it unstable, which seems
a lot clearer for non-experts; but dgit canonicalizes unstable to sid as a
side-effect of the same rule that currently canonicalizes stable to buster.
I would personally recommend debian/unstable.
smcv
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