Bug#1035733: debian -policy: packages must not use dpkg-divert to override default systemd configuraton files
Luca Boccassi <bluca@debian.org> writes:
> It depends on your pain threshold.
Salsa is worse for me for working on Policy in pretty much every respect
than email with patches. That's not a statement about my pain threshold.
It's a fundamental disagreement with you about which tools work better for
this specific type of maintenance.
> For me it's much easier and simpler and less painful to do all of that
> on Salsa, as opposed to wade through a bunch of random emails and
> scrolling up and down through the BTS.
I understand that you don't like email. The Policy process is optimized
for the Policy editors, rather than for the preferences of people who are
working on a specific change that they care about. I appreciate that this
can be annoying, but it's fairly typical for open source work. See, for
example, the Linux kernel, which likewise doesn't take merge requests, no
matter how inconvenient that may be for contributors.
> I'm sure there were some suggestions earlier in the thread, that I now
> have forgotten about, and they will be lost because there's no way I'm
> going back wading through dozens of random replies to figure out what is
> applied and what is not.
That's fine; this is part of the job of the Policy editors.
> I'm not suggesting that you stop using emails to send your changes - I'm
> simply asking to reconsider making policy work like the vast majority of
> other parts of Debian, and _also_ accepts merge requests on Salsa, in
> _addition_ to emails.
I have considered it several times, and I considered it again as part of
this recent conversation before writing my reply.
> Then the submitter can choose. I suspect you are going to get a lot more
> contributions this way,
Maximizing contribution of merge requests doesn't help the bottleneck for
Policy changes. Policy changes are often complex and require thought and
research. Most of the patches we get are incorrect or incomplete to start
with. The bottleneck is time from people with a lot of in-depth Debian
knowledge to think deeply about a problem.
If the people who routinely provide detailed and incredibly useful
analyses of Policy problems say that they would rather use Salsa to do so,
that's important feedback and I would like to hear that feedback. But the
goal here is not to maximize development speed. It's to think hard about
a problem and get the answer correct.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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