Hi, On 13.04.24 00:19, Marc Haber wrote:
'Require' is probably the wrong word. I simply have heard from several potential young contributors that they feel blocked by the tooling and specifically not everything in Git.
That does not only apply to young contributors. I am an old fart and I still shy back from packages where I need to familiarize myself with an uncommon packaging toolchain.
We cannot help people who want Debian packaging to work like Git, because Git is not a packaging tool, and neither are the forges.
We're not even doing anyone a favour by introducing the git based workflows first, because about half of the techniques people know from git will conflict with something git-buildpackage or dgit does, and without a mental model of how Debian packaging is supposed to work standalone, they have no chance of solving even the simplest problem.
For example, any repository that does not list debian/files and debian/*.substvars in the gitignore will fail to build twice in a row, because these files are created and are subsequently untracked. Only Debian packaging knowledge can tell you that these should never be checked in and can be ignored -- or we make people reliant on a magic tool to set it up properly for them.
Once people are familiar with how Debian packaging works, we can introduce the git interfaces on top. Before that, git is more of a hindrance than a benefit to new contributors, precisely because it looks familiar, but the knowledge is not transferable.
Simon
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