Bug#27906: PROPOSED] Binary-only NMU's

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Roman Hodek writes ("Bug#27906: PROPOSED] Binary-only NMU's"):
...
> Having slept a night over the issue :-), I had a similar idea.
> 
> If Ian says the patch must be available also on the FTP site, not
> (only) in the BTS, why not it put there in some way? My idea just
> wasn't coupled to architectures, more to versions. I see several
> possibilities:
> 
>  - For each NMU, there's an additional patch file in the source
>    directory, e.g. foo_1.0-1.0.1.nmu that is PGP signed by the creator
>    and contians the patch for the bin-only NMU. foo's files could then
>    look like:
> 
>       source/bar/foo_1.0.orig.tar.gz
>       source/bar/foo_1.0-1.diff.gz
>       source/bar/foo_1.0-1.dsc
>       source/bar/foo_1.0-1.0.1.nmu
>       binary-baz/bar/foo_1.0-1.deb
>       binary-mum/bar/foo_1.0-1.0.1.deb

This is an interesting idea, which could be investigated further.

This probably ought to apply to _any_ NMU, not just an arch-specific
one.

It doesn't work well for new upstream versions.

>    Since .nmu files aren't .dsc files, they constitute no real new
>    source version, thus they don't force other archs to recompile the
>    package, too. But the patch is publically available.

I disagree: other archs _should_ recompile, but there's no harm in a
small amount of version skew at release time.

Ian.