On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 10:04:03AM +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote: > On Fri, 11 Apr 2008, Joey Hess wrote: > > Could the maintainers clarify what criteria are used to mark a given source > > format such as 3.0 (git) as "experimental"? > > I hope it doesn't come down to one member of the dpkg team's personal > > preference. > Well, I wrote the manual page, so it was my decision but I believe it's > backed up by my opinion and the one expressed by Guillem: > Instead I chose to mark them as experimental to show that we don't believe > that they are ready to be used in large-scale (like, say, on ftp-master). Uh, whether they're ready to use on ftp-master isn't up to just the dpkg team. And if that were the reason to mark them experimental, then Format: 2.0, Format: 3.0 (native), Format: 3.0 (quilt) and Format: 3.0 (custom) should all have been marked experimental too. The custom format in particular is unlikely to ever be accepted, it seems to me; I suspect 2.0 is entirely obsolete at this point; and for most packages, it's better to choose "1.0" over "3.0 (native)" because it can be unpacked by more people; which mostly leaves the manpage promoting "quilt" as the bestest version control format over git and bzr. Not impressive. Heck, in /my/ opinion, all of 2.0, native, quilt and custom are less likely to be accepted on ftp-master as they currently stand -- native git and bzr support is a much bigger win than any of the others over what we can currently do. A fairer summary would seem to be: Format: 1.0 Default format. (native and orig+diff) Format: 2.0 Obsolete experimental format. Format: 3.0 (git), (bzr), (quilt) Native support for the git, bzr and quilt version control systems. Format: 3.0 (native) Expansion of 1.0 native format to support more compression types. Format: 3.0 (custom) For experimentation with new formats. Cheers, aj
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