Re: Figuring how to work with team-maintained packages on salsa
On Fri, Jun 04, 2021 at 07:43:59PM +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
> I want to add a few patches to this repository:
>
> <https://salsa.debian.org/glibc-team/glibc/>
>
> Surely there must be some tool support to help with that? I know how
> to do it manually (perhaps even involving quilt). Has every Debian
> developer their own script for that? (It's like this in RPM land …)
There is no homogeneity on git repositories. The sad truth is that if
you want to work with arbitrary packages in a homogeneous way, it is
best to avoid git entirely and work with .debdiffs instead. Eventually,
dgit might solve this, but its adoption still is fairly low.
Most of the time we're in favour of choice, flexibility and diversity.
This is one of the areas where diversity kills productivity. We've
mostly realized that for packaging helpers and the majority of the
archive uses dh now. It'll take another decade for us to realize this on
the vcs level.
Raphaël tried to formalize this in
https://lists.debian.org/20140815141601.GA11454@x230-buxy.home.ouaza.com,
but consensus wasn't reached back then in 2014. He did a stab via DEP-14
starting at
https://lists.debian.org/20141111212624.GA19601@home.ouaza.com, but that
wasn't released either. For his work on dgit, Ian Jackson started an
informal survey on git packaging workflows at
https://lists.debian.org/21933.9687.747175.762898@chiark.greenend.org.uk.
Sam Harmann continued the effort in 2019 with
https://lists.debian.org/tslh86j7hgt.fsf@suchdamage.org. The one thing
that we learned in all this is that there are only few things we agree
on and that everyone wants to keep using their workflow.
As someone who regularly does archive-wide work, I can tell that this
diversity is a barrier to contributing.
Helmut
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