Re: finally end single-person maintainership
Simon Richter <sjr@debian.org> writes:
> A better approach would not treat Debian metadata as git data. Even the
> most vocal advocate of switching everything to Salsa writes in his MR
> that the changelog should not be touched in a commit, because it creates
> conflicts, and instead a manual step will need to be performed later.
This is not a Debian-specific problem and has nothing to do with any
special properties of our workflows or differences between packaging and
other software maintenance tasks. It's a common issue faced by everyone
who has ever maintained a software package in Git and wanted to publish a
change log.
There are oodles of tools and workflows to handle this problem, ranging
from writing the change log based on the Git commits when you're making
the release to accumulating fragments of release notes in separate files
and using a tool to merge them. dch's approach of using the Git commit
messages is one of the standard solutions, one that will be familiar to
many people who have faced this same problem in other contexts.
The hard part with these sorts of problems is agreeing on the tool and
workflow to use to solve it, something Debian struggles with more than
most software projects because we lack a decision-making body that can say
things like "we're going to use scriv" and make it stick. But that isn't
because packaging is a special problem unsuited to Git. Git has a rich
ecosystem with many effective solutions to problems of this sort. It's
because we've chosen a governance model that intentionally makes central
decision-making and therefore consistency and coordination difficult, in
exchange for other perceived benefits.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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