Re: r31136 - in /trunk/podlators-perl/debian: changelog rules
On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 05:51:22PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> > + * Explicitly enable the maintainer spelling tests.
>
> You may not want to do this; I'm not sure. The reason why I disabled it
> for people other than me is that it seems to be very sensitive to
> different spelling dictionaries and I was seeing a *lot* of variation of
> spelling dictionaries in different environments. You *should* normally be
> okay in Debian since I do development in Debian, but it's possible that
> you'll suddenly get FTBFS when a new version of aspell is uploaded to
> Debian. I think this is mostly going to make autobuilds more fragile
> without a lot of upside.
I'm not quite sure either, and this is not a big issue for me.
The rationale for enabling the tests was precisely that the amount of
variation inside Debian would be small enough.
The small upside is that we now notice any problems (semi)automatically
and can send you a patch :) Also, if aspell has changed too much to
fix the tests easily, there's always the quick fix available by just
disabling the maintainer tests again.
As a more general note, I think it makes sense for Debian to guard against
bit rot in all parts of the packages we include, at least when it's easy
to do.
Even if the upstream maintainer doesn't care, the maintenance burden may
fall on us in the future in case of upstream inactivity. Any "maintainer
tests" become our domain at that point, but the point may go unnoticed
for a long time, so nobody is going to enable the tests then.
Obviously, small incremental fixes are easier than sorting the problems
out five years later when several components have changed.
The problems would ideally be reported upstream as wishlist bugs with
patches. If upstream is active but doesn't care about the bitrot and
doesn't accept fixes (this has happened too), we can certainly disable
the tests, but I think we should usually turn them on by default.
--
Niko Tyni ntyni@debian.org
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