Bug#850156: Please firmly deprecate vendor-specific series files [and 1 more messages]
On Wed, Apr 18, 2018 at 09:11:11PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> There isn't even a guarantee that what gets synced to Ubuntu has ever
> been unpacked - or *can* be unpacked - with dpkg-source.
Indeed. Not only is there no guarantee, but it goes wrong in practice
too.
As an operator of merges.ubuntu.com, I run into this from time to time,
because that service's daily operation involves unpacking all new
versions of source packages and generating diffs from previous versions
(yes, this predates attempts to get everything into consistent version
control). When that service encounters a source package that simply
can't be unpacked, it bombs out and an operator (i.e. me) has to deal
with it. Fortunately this is not very common overall, but I've
definitely seen a few cases where a source package could be unpacked on
Debian but not on Ubuntu due to the use of an outdated vendor series
file that was allegedly there specifically for Ubuntu's benefit. And
that's leaving aside the related cases where a patch accidentally got
omitted from Ubuntu because a maintainer forgot that they needed to
update both series files (there's no #include mechanism - see
#632305/#632313).
It's not surprising to me that this happens, because the tooling for
dealing with these files is IME not particularly good. You basically
have to point quilt at a different series file and manually refresh a
separate stack, and you have to remember to do that whenever you make
any substantial change to the rest of the patch stack. Of course
developers sometimes forget to do that, especially if they weren't the
ones who introduced the ubuntu.series file in the first place. And
given that these generally represent poorly-factored patches in any case
in the ways that Steve and others have pointed out, I don't think it's a
good use of time to try to improve the tooling.
I second Steve's opinion that, in the aggregate, this feature is
actively harmful to downstreams (notwithstanding some individual cases
where it may be locally helpful) and should be removed.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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