Bug#986320: Stronger advice on when to use native packages
David Bremner <david@tethera.net> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
>> Currently, Debian Policy is silent on when it's appropriate to use a
>> native package, but there may be a project consensus aganist using
>> native packages when the software has an existence outside of Debian.
> Personally I don't think Debian policy should be concerned with what
> happens outside Debian. As long as a given process serves the users and
> contributors of/to Debian well, that seems sufficient to me.
To be clear, my understanding of the advocacy of using non-native packages
is primarily about their impact on *Debian* workflows (being able to base
multiple packages on the same tarball, not introducing confusion between
upstream version numbers and Debian version numbers and thus making it
easier for other people in Debian to track the package to an upstream
version, triggering various package checks that ignore native packages but
care about non-native packages such as uscan, etc.).
> I understand that others disagree, particularly on how much we should
> consider the needs of derivative distributions.
This is a good additional point for discussion, though, since I vaguely
recall that using native packages had some oddities for derivative
distributions, which is a significant Debian user use case.
>> Even if that consensus does not exist, there is probably consensus that
>> native packages are a poor match for large packages (because of the
>> inefficiency of making small updates to the packaging of native
>> packages), and there may be other cases where we can give stronger
>> guidance.
> That seems more like something that could be documented in devref as a
> best practice, rather than something needing normative language.
Yes, that's a good point; it's possible that some or all of this belongs
in devref rather than Policy.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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