Hi, On Do 19 Apr 2018 06:29:42 CEST, Steve Langasek wrote:
On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 02:36:14PM +0200, Mike Gabriel wrote:> This feature is a very bad idea. I can see why people thought it > might be nice: it means you can use the same (or very similar) .dsc > (and perhaps vcs history) on different distros.Disagreeing here...The vendor.series file is a really helpful thing if you share packaging workload with people from different Debian derivatives.My main context when working for Debian derivates is: get everything into Debian, bind the derivatives' devs' (wo)man(or other) power to Debian and allow them to achieve their goals for their derivative distro at the same time. Maintaining several slightly different src:package versions in Debian and derivative X, Y and Z costs a lot of time.The vendor.series file is a tiny helper tool, that eases people's day if working in a context I described above.With Ubuntu, where the vendor.series (i.e. ubuntu.series) file is used here and there in my team contexts, you sometimes encounter Ubuntu patches in third party package (which you don't have impact on) that break a certain behaviour in a vanilla Debian package. Thus, having the mechanism to easily patch the Ubuntu build of your package is very handy.This post makes me think it all the more urgent that it be disallowed, to the point that I am considering whether Ubuntu should patch dpkg downstream to disregard vendor.series files. There are two perfectly well supported workflows here for Ubuntu: you can make your patches upstreamable (to Debian or to upstream) such that they can be applied to the source and any per-distro behavior differences can be accommodated via build-time flags; or you can keep your patches downstream in Ubuntu only, and handle new Debian package versions via a manual merge. There is no need for a third workflow to accommodate improperly-upstreamed patches and breaking the behavior of dpkg-source.
There is a third one, we use in MATE.Bring everything to Debian and let it pour into Ubuntu as long as possible. Ubuntu deltas are only merged manually during freeze either of Debian or Ubuntu.
One example, where the vendor.series file is really helpful is: https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-mate/mate-terminal.git/tree/debian/patches/2001_fix-find-next-previous.patchThe above mate-terminal patch is a reaction to a Ubuntu patch in VTE ("revert-pcre2.patch") and applied via the ubuntu.series file. The VTE patch in Ubuntu might be questionable by itself, but as long as it is shipped with Ubuntu, we need to maintain two different versions of mate-terminal, one for Debian and one for Ubuntu. (I have seen other cases, e.g. accountsservice)
Manually merging this delta again and again after each Debian upload of mate-terminal, would complicate the workflow on the Ubuntu maintainer's side unnecessarily.
Mike -- DAS-NETZWERKTEAM mike gabriel, herweg 7, 24357 fleckeby mobile: +49 (1520) 1976 148 landline: +49 (4354) 8390 139 GnuPG Fingerprint: 9BFB AEE8 6C0A A5FF BF22 0782 9AF4 6B30 2577 1B31 mail: mike.gabriel@das-netzwerkteam.de, http://das-netzwerkteam.de
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