On Sat, Sep 05, 2009 at 12:49:23PM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > On Fri, Sep 04, 2009 at 08:26:10PM +0200, Luk Claes wrote: > > Wouter Verhelst wrote: > > >>Given the recent thread in debian-devel[1], I think we should document in > > >>policy that packages that are not tightly related to Debian shouldn't be > > >>native. > > >So I spent a whole subthread trying to explain that I think this is > > >*not* true, and seemed to get consensus on that, and now you want to get > > >this into policy? > > Consensus is a big word, you managed to get people agree that if > > maintainers really considered all the downsides even our complaints > > from time to time that it would be acceptable... > Why, yes, indeed, that's what I'm saying: that there seemed to be > consensus on the fact that it is acceptable if people do indeed consider > the downsides; that the "shouldn't be native" statement is wrong. Hmm. I think that developers who insist on packaging their software natively are unlikely to be persuaded by anything I have to say, and I think that there's no existing policy that prohibits developers from doing this. That doesn't mean I agree that it's *acceptable*. > What I'd like to see before I would support this proposal (or anything > like it), is how exactly the practice of releasing non-Debian-specific > software as native packages is causing harm to either Debian, or the > greater free software community as a whole; since I don't think it does, > and I don't think we should forbid a practice which may make a > maintainer's workflow easier if it is indeed harmless. It makes a mess of NMUs (extra disk space for source packages in the archive since our convention is now for NMUs of native packages to also be native and use native version numbers). It makes it awkward to put such packages through the orphaning/adoption process. Maybe I would be happier about dealing with native packages if there was a clear policy that packaging software as native implies that any DD is allowed to release a new upstream version of the software. :-) -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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