On 8/29/20 3:33 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:
> I think the primary thing that bothers me about this workflow is that
> experimental becomes an ephemeral branch, which appears and disappears
> based on the vagaries of the release cycle.
To me, that feels like the branch is an accurate representation of
reality. The packages in experimental are ephemeral and appear and
disappear too, right?
> That said, one way in which this becomes concrete is the Vcs-Git control
> field. What do you put in the branch field for your experimental upload?
> Naming debian/experimental is clearly wrong; that branch is highly likely
> to not exist when someone later checks. Naming debian/unstable is also
> clearly wrong; the package is not based on that branch.
I wouldn't (and don't) put a branch name there. I don't think it serves
a practical purpose. If it does, I guess a corollary is that I/we should
be specifying debian/buster there for stable updates and likewise
debian/buster-backports for backports. Is that a thing people actually
do? I haven't been, but I can do so if that is a best practice.
I currently set the branch name in debian/gbp.conf because that actually
has a practical effect on the tools.
Putting the branch name in debian/gbp.conf leads to a small amount of
churn for things like stable updates and backports. I had forgotten
about the effects of that in your case. That does undercut my argument a
bit in the immediate term, as you'd have to change that when going
between experimental and unstable, which means they aren't just
fast-forward merges. But if we standardize on this naming convention as
I propose, then gbp could default to these branch names, which means we
wouldn't need to set branch names in debian/gbp.conf. That seems like
the best long-term outcome.
> It's valid to say that it's okay for me to feel odd and I can cope with
> feeling odd and follow the convention anyway.
To be honest, I lean towards that view. But you've been doing Debian
development more and/or longer than me (and more to the point here,
actually use experimental regularly), so I'm very hesitant to dismiss
your viewpoint. I could easily be missing something.
I would love to see other people weigh in on debian/latest vs
debian/unstable as the default. Assuming the silent majority is using
debian/{master,latest}, is that out of a considered preference over
debian/unstable or out of inertia / following other packages / following
DEP-14? In other words, how many people _care_ either way?
--
Richard
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