Re: QA Upload best practices, 2nd draft

[Martin Michlmayr <tbm@cyrius.com>]

* Matthew Palmer <mpalmer@debian.org> [2004-07-19 13:05]:
> Would you encourage people to rewrite the packaging method used (eg
> convert from dh_ to cdbs) in a QA upload?  I'm thinking that, apart
> from fixing hideous bletcherisms of past maintainers (such as making
> upstream-available packages Debian-native) we would want to avoid
> major surgery like this.  Especially if you have several different
> QA people with different preferences as to build system -- every few
> uploads the build system changes again...

I think this is quite unlikely to happen for an QA upload because
someone rewriting the whole rules files would probably adopt the
package anyway.  However, if someone wants to do QA uploads and not
adopt the package, but only if there is a rules file they want to work
with, we shouldn't stop them from doing the upload - there are not
enough people doing QA uploads anyway.

Anyway, I think the scenario is not very likely.  I was more thinking
about new upstream released which is normally a bad idea for NMUs but
a good idea for QA uploads (if nobody uploads the new upstream
version, we lag behind upstream which just increases the likelihood of
me removing the package).  I suppose you can mention that rewriting
the rules file should only be done if there's a good reason and that
the lowest common dominator should be followed (which in my opinion is
debhelper, but not things like cdbs).
-- 
Martin Michlmayr
tbm@cyrius.com