Bug#515856: Debian Policy 4.1.4.0 released
Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> (ii) You make a very good argument that policy should continue to give
> guidance for this kind of situation. The target should probably be
> put back in policy, but with an explicit note saying it's not normally
> desirable, or something.
I think the Policy guidance is that you should document your maintenance
procedures in README.source if they're unusual, which would include this.
In that documentation, you can reference whatever scripts or targets would
be involved in doing an update.
I'm dubious there are really that many cases where knowing about a
get-orig-source target is the *only* piece of additional information
required about a source package and everything else is entirely standard.
I would expect somewhat non-standard upstreams to need at least some
additional explanation (how to choose a good upstream commit to package,
for instance).
I see that the current wording in Policy about README.source doesn't call
out this case (upstream updates) explicitly. Maybe it should.
I'm pretty reluctant to specify this sort of optional target that works
differently in every package that uses it back in Policy because it's
really not standardized, nor do I think it's possible to standardize. If
we really want to write something down about the target, maybe the
Developer's Reference would be a better spot? There were a whole host of
issues with having this in Policy that were resolved by moving it outside
the scope of Policy, such as how to document dependencies required for
running the get-orig-source target.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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