Hi Jelmer, On Tue, 02 Feb 2021, Jelmer Vernooij wrote: > One of the things that I've been wondering about is whether it would make > sense to have a configuration file in Debian packages that allows > maintainers to specify preferences for contributions. At the > moment, this is not a well-formed proposal yet - but I'm curious as to > your thoughts. I must say that we keep adding layers of complexity and this would just extend the amount of things that one should know about packaging. We need more consistency and not more choices. But in the end, those choices are differences that do already exist in practice. In the grand scheme of things, we should have a Debian-wide recommended way of handling packages and this configuration file would only be needed when a maintainer really wants to deviate from this recommended way. The DEP we need is the one that defines this default way of handling packages and contributions, and the file you want would only be a by-product of this. > * Generally speaking, the preferences would be the same for > all packages maintained by a specific team/person. Having to copy > these preferences into every git repository in a set (e.g. > perl-team) seems tedious and unnecessarily repetitive. Maybe this > should live in a separate database somewhere, or perhaps it can be > specified in salsa somehow on a per-team basis? Somehow this ship has sailed, plenty of teams do commit debian/gbp.conf and debian/salsa-ci.yml in all their repositories. At least the GitLab CI has an URL include mechanism that makes it possible to create a team-wide configuration and include it. > * Should this really be a separate file, or could it be folded > in elsewhere? I don't know of anything else but if we create a new file, I'd rather have it in debian/source/ rather than right below debian. > * Allowing maintainers to specify preferences might also make it more > likely that packaging habits diverge - and that could it make it > harder rather than easier to contribute to packages. At the very > least, we should be careful what sort of preferences can be > specified. +1 > * A lot of these things can be detected with heuristics. In a > way, adding a configuration file is an easy way out - instead of > getting these tools to just do the right thing without making a > human edit a file. Indeed. 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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