Bug#27906: devel-ref maintainer's opinion on Binary-only NMU's
On Thu 22 Oct 1998, Adam P. Harris wrote:
>
> Finally, I'd like to hear for any listening porters (Roman?) about why
Paul OK? :-)
> binary-only NMUs are a necessary part of their porting workflow. I
> understand they are simply a lot faster to produce in cases where
> minor, interactive style hacking is required on a package.
They are currently "necessary" because of the mandatory waiting period
between filing a bug and doing a "normal" NMU (i.e. with source). It's
not manageable for porters who do dozens if not hunderds of packages to
keep track of all of this.
If policy is changed that for portability issues immediate "normal" NMUs
are permitted, then I'd have no problem in doing this. The point is that
currently it is _not_ policy, and I'd invoke the wrath of those developers
who don't immediately understand the problem, and who subsequently feel
that their authority over their package has been stepped on. This _has_
happened in the past...
Aside: most maintainers respond very well to my NMU bug reports, and some
actually ask how they can be more helpful, etc. A couple simply never
respond, and also don't make any effort to implement the patches. In those
cases a normal NMU would be in order, however, I can't keep track of this
all. Is there a way to find all bug reports submitted by a particular
person (i.e. email address) ? This would help here (especially if a
constraint could be added such as "older than x days").
> But again, the binary or source NMU issue is a moot point, licensing
> wise, until the management of source in the Debian archive is fixed.
I'm in total agreement here.
Paul Slootman
--
home: paul@wurtel.demon.nl | work: paul@murphy.nl | debian: paul@debian.org
http://www.wurtel.demon.nl | Murphy Software, Enschede, the Netherlands
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