Hi, On 02.04.19 05:59, Louis-Philippe Véronneau wrote: > Some teams might dislike it, but I guess those people will also dislike > the idea of giving all DDs commit access on all packages VCS. Y'all are still solving social problems with technical solutions here, and it's a bad technical solution because it doesn't even solve the technical problem. From a technical point of view, this is a classic "top-of-the-foodchain" problem, in which multiple platforms are contending to integrate all of the others. Debian's solution to this problem was to define: - Debian source packages live at the top of the foodchain - Debian source packages look precisely like *this* The format was designed around the realities of free software at that time, so of course it looks rather limited to us now. But if we are to change it, just slapping a thin layer on top will not be sufficient, and the way we currently use version control is just that, with lots of workarounds for things that aren't solved. Seriously, pristine-tar is cool, but it's still a hack, and so is storing patches in a VCS. Our users' requirements have not changed that much that we can do away with the "original upstream release plus integration patches" concept, and any version control system we'd use should be able to replicate this without tricky hacks. If that means extending Git with a bunch of new object types, so be it. The real problem is still a social one, though. Debian Policy is a protocol, not a platform. It defines the interchange format between a number of tools, not the tools themselves. It also does not define how the tools are to be used. Mandating that everyone uses a specific workflow is a marked deviation from that, and it effectively throws out the Debian Policy in its entirety and replaces it by "whatever the platform currently accepts". To avoid this, we'd first need a new policy document that defines the new interface in a way that allows a conforming implementation to remain conforming until the document is changed. That is, if it references other technology as normative, it does so with a version number, the same way the Debian policy addresses differences in archiver versions. Anything less than that requires all tools to come from a single source. We have precedent for that, and it was a shitshow for precisely that reason. Simon
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