Re: PW#5-2: Maintainer's reaction on non-maintainer uploads

[Gregor Hoffleit <flight@thefly.mathi.uni-heidelberg.de>]

James Troup <J.J.Troup@scm.brad.ac.uk> wrote:
    Gregor Hoffleit <flight@mathi.uni-heidelberg.DE> writes:

    > Guy wrote:
    > > * If the nmu fixes many bugs, close the bugs, but reopen a new
    > > one with the diffs
    >
    > This is a diff [ ... ]

    Please watch your citations, Kai wrote that, not Guy.  And FWIW I
    agree with Guy, I do not like the idea of bugs being closed in
    non-maintainer releases.

Sorry about that. You're right, the citation was from Kai. Anyway,  
doesn't matter that much since my question didn't refer to the  
citation anyway.

The Policy Manual 2.3.0.1 doesn't say anything about nmu's.  
Christian's Developers Reference 0.2 reads as follows:

>"Maintainers other than the usual package maintainer should make as
>few changes to the package as possible, and they should always send a
>unified context diff (diff -u) detailing their changes to the bug
>tracking system properly flagged with the correct package to that the
>usual maintainer is kept aware of the situation."

I guess this is to mean "diff -u MAINTAINER-RELEASE  
NON-MAINTAINER-UPLOAD". This is certainly not reasonable for  
non-maintainer uploads of new upstream versions, where I'd expect  
something along the lines of "diff -u MAINTAINER-RELEASE-diff  
NON-MAINTAINER-UPLOAD-diff".


Regarding the notification about fixed bugs in nmu's: Is it really  
intentional that this way (what Christian and Guy propose) the fixed  
bugs won't be recorded anywhere in the package (since I can't list  
them in the changelog), but would only be visible from looking at the  
bugs database ?


schwarz@monet.m.isar.de (Christian Schwarz)  wrote on 13.01.98 in  
<[🔎] 199801132234.XAA04197@klee.painters.schwarz-online.com>:
>    * The normal maintainer should do at least one of
>         o apply the diff
>         o read the diff and decide on each part of it themselves
>         o read the description of the patches and ensure that they
>           fix each problem that was fixed in the non-maintainer
>           release.

Sorry, what does the last point mean ? Is it to say "read the  
description of the patches and close the bug reports of the problems  
that are indeed fixed by the nmu" ?


kaih@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen) added:
>s/patches/changes to the next upstream version/

Uh ? "read the description of the changes to the next upstream  
version..." ? Now I'm completely clueless about the meaning of this.


	Gregor