Re: dpkg semi-hijack - an announcement (also, triggers)
On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 10:01:35AM +0000, Ian Jackson wrote:
> > On Mon, 2008-03-10 at 14:42:48 +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > > Against the wishes of, afaict, Guillem and Raphael, Ian's made applying
> > > his triggers patch dependent on:
> > >
> > > - reversion to two space indenting
>
> The history of this change is as follows:
> * At some point, without any kind of discussion, Guillem
> unilaterally reformats several files to 8-character indents.
> * On the *26th of June 2006* I noticed this because it caused
> an unnecessary merge conflict while I was trying to do a merge
> between the Ubuntu and Debian versions of dpkg.
> * I thought it was a mistake because surely no-one would
> deliberately change the indent depth in an existing piece of free
> software. (A plausible mechanism for the mistake involves an
> editor with tab-width set to 2; these kind of things do happen
> occasionally.)
> * I therefore posted saying to debian-dpkg that this loooked like a
> mistake. I also filed a bug, #375711, with a patch to revert the
> change.
> * On the *30th of May 2007* I got the same merge conflict again in a
> later merge. My bug report had gone unanswered. By this point
> there is a considerable body of changes in Ubuntu which ought to
> be merged into Debian, all of which have the original formatting
> as I requested in my bug report.
> * So I post to debian-dpkg again and Guillem tells me it was
> deliberate.
>
> Since then I have been trying to do as little work as possible. I did
> the triggers based on the Ubuntu branch (with the original 2-space
> indent) because that was less work since the plan was to deploy it in
> Ubuntu first.
Formally, you speak of branches we should merge from, but when you merge a
branch into trunk, it is the latter that you take as the reference wrt
unrelated changes like indentation.
It seems to me that the root of the problem is that out of the three branches
you mentioned, you didn't really agree on which is the real trunk. If you did,
you would have split indentation and triggers in two completely different
patches/proposals/discussions (often this is a good idea even if your patches
depend on each other; occasionally I've submitted patches that break my own
patches [1]).
And most importantly, you wouldn't contemplate deploying somewhere else an
implementation of triggers that hasn't been accepted in dpkg, because of the
danger of creating (and maintaining) a sustained incompatibility.
>From my POV, this means you were already challenging Guillem way before
starting this thread.
[1] for your amusement, this happened to me on dpkg:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=355654#10
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=440636#5
--
Robert Millan
<GPLv2> I know my rights; I want my phone call!
<DRM> What use is a phone call… if you are unable to speak?
(as seen on /.)
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