Re: Breaks in lenny
Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> writes:
> 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?
Well, basically every discussion about this that I've seen on -devel,
discussions on -mentors, the teams that I'm familiar with (pkg-perl is
standardizing on quilt and other major packaging efforts seem to be doing
likewise), and my impression from reading debian/changelog files.
git may be changing this over time. For example, the X Strike Force used
quilt, but my impression is that they're now just using git.
> 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.
My understanding is that both the security and release team members have
(understandably) grumbled about the number of package build systems but
are at this point willing to deal with dpatch and quilt as long as people
don't add *more*. The problems for them are dbs, yada, and the other more
marginal ones; quilt and dpatch are fairly known entities.
Not to mention that I started using quilt specifically because Steve
Langasek recommended it. :)
> (1698 packages build-depend on dpatch, 905 on quilt, 2767 on dbs, and
> 10793 don't.)
I'm surprised at the number of dbs packages still out there. I wouldn't
have expected that. The quilt vs. dpatch breakdown doesn't surprise me; I
think that's in part a product of dpatch having been around longer and in
part because dpatch can do some things that quilt can't.
How many of the 10793 that don't depend on any of these systems have diffs
outside of the debian directory? That's the total population that's
interesting here. I would hope that most Debian packages had no need to
modify the upstream source at all.
>> 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.
Except that many of those are using Subversion, which is useless for this
particular goal since you can't ship the repository with the source
package and since there isn't the merging support that you get from using
quilt or dpatch.
It's specifically the git, bzr, arch, and Mercurial packages (and maybe
Monotone and some of the other less-used VCSes) that have additional
possibilities here.
> 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.
Right, but as long as they're not shipping the repository with the source
package, quilt and dpatch are still useful tools. A VCS doesn't replace
them at all. Using Subversion and using quilt are essentially completely
orthogonal; I use both for most of my packages.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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