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Re: Breaks in lenny



Russ Allbery wrote:
> I understand that you and a few other DDs feel that way, but you appear to
> be outnumbered at the moment.

By whom? IIRC I've heard both release team and security team members
state they prefer dealing with packages that don't use those things, and
a majority of packages don't use them. (1698 packages build-depend on
dpatch, 905 on quilt, 2767 on dbs, and 10793 don't.)

> Personally, I much prefer to work on
> packages where I'm not the maintainer if they use quilt and/or dpatch; it
> makes me far more comfortable than dealing with the giant wad of patch
> approach.

Personally, when I was doing security work, if the package used those
systems it either wasted my time and didn't get a security fix as
quickly as possible, or got a non-ideal NMU that ignored it. Ditto for
release work, RC bug squashing, and other frequent NMU work.

> > Best practice is to use a proper revision control system (one which can
> > do patch stack management if that's desired) and generate a consolidated
> > .dsc/.diff.gz for people who don't want to get to grips with it.
> 
> It may be that this will be what finally gets us away from using such
> tools, but I'm not sure how long it will take.

3714 source packages have Vcs-* fields, that's more already than those
build-depending on quilt and dbs combined.

(Ignoring the small number of cases that use both version control and
quilt.)

> I'm happy to support going in that direction, but I think we'll need to be
> realistic about how long it will take to move the whole project.  quilt
> and dpatch have been building momentum for quite a while now, taking over
> from the wad-of-patch approach, and any replacement will take at least as
> long (and probably longer if its not VCS-agnostic).

My guess is packages with Vcs- fields will surpass packages using all 3
patch systems in the next 3 to 4 months. dpkg has only supported these
fields since September. Many larger projects like pkg-perl and d-i have
added the field to hundreds of their packages in version control and
just haven't gotten around to uploading all of those packages yet.

-- 
see shy jo

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