Bug#850156: Please firmly deprecate vendor-specific series files
Hi,
On Fri, 6 Jan 2017 16:33:09 +0100 Andreas Henriksson <andreas@fatal.se>
wrote:
> The vendor series files are mostly useless because most of the time you
> want /additional/ vendor patches, but the vendor series files completely
> replaces the original debian/patches/series which means you duplicate
> the maintenance anyway and the vendor series files will likely get
> outdated and miss important patches.
Appending various series files to one another is tricky, because the
patch order might not be linear.
> In practise what instead happens is that debian/rules gets hacked to
> query dpkg-vendor (or $(DEB_VENDOR)) and apply the extra patches or do
> derivate/vendor specific things to the package.
> If you go looking in the archive you'll find that this is likely much
> more common than the few examples you've found that uses the vendor
> specific series.
Oh, yeah. Seen that, too. This makes debian/rules file really awful.
Esp. when quilt patching and debian/rules patching gets combined.
> In reality you always need to download the binary packages that the
> vendor built and the users are actually running to investigate them. If
> you need to rebuild them you should do so on the vendors platform to be
> sure about them generating similar result.
Or actually get the derivatives ISO, install the derivative in a VM and
test the package there.
> Thus, even if you deprecate vendor series files that will make little
> practical difference. I don't see the point. The only thing you'll
> accomplish is to make it a bit harder for different vendors to
> collaborate on the same source in Debian rather than downstreams
> carrying their own delta and we stick our head in the sand on the debian
> side and pretend it doesn't exist.
+1 for the last statement. I fully agree on this. The vendor.series file
provides a simple mech to ease cooperation with Debian downstream
package maintainers.
light+love
Mike (who hopes that he can continue using vendor.series files for a
while...)
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