Re: Advice on an interesting package
Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de> writes:
> Christoph Egger <christoph@debian.org> writes:
>> Well upstreams are encouraged to not include the debian/ stuff in
>> their release tarballs. It might be better to have debian/ in a separat
>> branch but having it in upstream VCS isn't a problem right away.
> I disagree.
> I think it is perfectly fine for upstream to have a debian dir. Idealy
> the Debian maintainer should have write permissions to the upstream VCS
> and fix packaging problems directly there.
> What is a problem is when upstream has a broken debian dir or one that
> diverges too much from what debian has. But if upstream keeps the debian
> in sync and functional that works just fine.
This is very difficult to do. Speaking as an upstream who is also a
Debian Developer, even I don't include the debian directory in upstream
releases. I tried that model for a while and found all sorts of serious
problems with it, such as needing to do a new release whenever anything
changes about the debian directory in order to bring things back into
sync. One ends up with divergent content for the debian directory anyway
and the debian directory included with the upstream release is often not
useful. And this is all to very little benefit for the end user, who can
as easily run apt-get source if they want to build the Debian package
somewhere else as use the debian directory in the upstream release.
So while this sounds like an okay idea, in practice it doesn't work. So I
agree with Christoph.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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