(Resending without the attachment for posterity sinte the message didn't make it to -devel, but I also had no bounce notifying me that it was discarded...) Hello, On Sun, 30 Aug 2020, Richard Laager wrote: > You could use debian/experimental all the time and then merge down to > debian/unstable only when you're ready to upload and have chosen > unstable. But I suspect your objection would be: that's unnecessary > busywork. And I see that point. I would probably make the same > objection, which means I think I agree with the debian/latest concept in > your situation. You perfectly understood my reasoning. Thank you for making that effort. > I'm not sure if most package maintainers are doing this or not. I've > always assumed that most people are targetting only unstable most of the > time and that use of experimental is relatively rare. I could easily be > wrong on that. I don't think that you are wrong. Most packages definitely only target unstable and never use experimental. But most packages also never need to maintain two development branches in parallel. Only very big packages, linux or django for example, will maintain different upstream versions in two parralel branches. Another thing that's quite certain is that you never know what the future will bring you. And while you never had to use experimental, you might have to at some point. In that sense, I find debian/latest more future-proof but I also agree that for the few cases where we would have to use experimental, it's not a big deal to have to create debian/experimental. Another thing to take into account is that DEP-14 has been drafted as a vendor-neutral recommendation. I use it in the context of Kali and there's no "unstable" release in Kali. We have "kali-dev". Ubuntu only has codenames even for their development release. Thus <vendor>/latest is a better default for tools like git-buildpackage and it makes sense for DEP-14 to endorse such a default branch as the recommended name. > That is, I'm generally always targetting unstable and _not_ regularly > using multiple releases, so the DEP-14 language "prohibits" me from > using debian/unstable. This is what feels backwards to me. If I'm always > targetting unstable, debian/latest (and previously debian/master) is > less clear than debian/unstable. > > At a minimum, can we rework this in some way so the language does not > require me to be regularly using multiple releases to use > debian/unstable as a branch name? That seems entirely reasonable, yes. Can you try to make a proposal ? I attach the current markdown file with my not-yet pushed change that I submitted for review here. Cheers, -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Raphaël Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ The Debian Handbook: https://debian-handbook.info/get/ ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ Debian Long Term Support: https://deb.li/LTS
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