Re: [Gimp-print-devel] Debian packaging of gutenprint
Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2008 01:18:02 +0000
From: Roger Leigh <rleigh@codelibre.net>
For Debian, the version number consists of three parts:
epoch:upstream-debian
Realistically, I suspect that that's the best we can do, but...
debian is the version of the debian release. Normally just a signed
integer; names such as lenny1 are used for updates to stable releases.
We don't usually put the name "debian" in the version because it's
implicit. It's currently taken as a given that the Debian version may
or may not include patches to the source distribution.
It may be implicit within the Debian community, but it's not implicit
to upstream package maintainers who may not know what bits really are
being installed. The problem here is that a lot of people file bugs
or whatnot against the package, when in some cases the problem may be
from patches that aren't ours. This causes two problems: it makes it
harder for us to track down problems and it makes users unhappy with
us for reasons beyond our control.
One particularly egregious example of this was the margins patch that
some distributions applied to 5.0.0 in a misguided attempt to work
around a genuine problem. Unfortunately, it meant that people
couldn't print borderless (or anywhere near borderless) to *any*
printers using certain paper sizes, and when we then fixed it in
5.0.1, not every distribution bothered to remove the patch (because
the fix was in an entirely unrelated area). Fortunately, this should
be dead in 5.2; we've moved papers.xml (which will break automatic
patching) and I also added a bunch of XML comments to papers.xml that
should break even something that can track files moving. Hopefully
this will be enough for even someone completely asleep at the wheel to
realize that that "fix" needs to go away.
I don't believe that we can absolutely insist that distributors change
EXTRA_VERSION if they apply any patches (I don't think that that would
be compatible with the GPL), but I don't think that it's out of line
for us to *request* that distributors do their best to insulate us
from private patches.
--
Robert Krawitz <rlk@alum.mit.edu>
Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf@uunet.uu.net
Project lead for Gutenprint -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net
"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton
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