On Thu, 2010-04-01 at 08:43 +0200, Gilles Dartiguelongue wrote: > Guys, Hey Gilles. > although this might sound like a good idea, please remember a couple > of > things: > * upstream generally doesn't know well about respective > distributions build system which means they will most likely > make mistakes and end up not maintaining it that much There are tens of millions of people worldwide using Debian based distributions and most of those just take the vanilla debianization and might add a desktop icon here, or a minor postinstall hook there. Dare I even say, most of the Seahorse users are likely using some flavour of Debian. Maintaining it is usually trivial and often just involves adding a line or two to debian/control or adding to debian/changelog. Starting with Ubuntu's debian folder as a boiler plate, this becomes even easier. Moreover, downstream patches are often important when they involve security issues in which case integrating them isn't a bad thing. They are all logically organized into debian/patches Having both downstream and upstream working with their own debianized tree doesn't prevent either from doing anything they normally do. If anything, it makes life easier for both. > * downstream already does the job of packaging for their distro > fine with people dedicated to that QA checks, ... as long as > the > package is well behaved (like most autotools/cmake based > packages are), the work is even easy I'm not saying that upstream packages should replace downstream's process of QA checks, and so on. I'm saying that it is handy to be able to build the latest package oneself for testing, personal use, or what have you. This means more people will be more inclined to test the latest source because there are far fewer headaches involved and they don't make a mess outside the package manager's guidance in /usr/local or some other prefix. > * your favorite distribution provides an easy way to > rebuild/update yourself the package, apt-get source, rpmsrc, > cp > for gentoo, ... Except you can only get the latest distribution package whenever the package maintainer decides to push it. Sometimes this can even be years. This longstanding tradition of decoupling the relation between downstream and upstream originated in a time when there was a far greater heterogeneous distribution of GNU distributions out there than now. Adding a single folder (debian), or two (rpm), hardly can be seen as clutter and convolution. > > I hope this makes it clear that downstream stuff has no place in > upstream repositories. > > -- > Gilles Not really, but it is good that we discuss these things as a community. -- Kip Warner -- Software Developer President & CEO Kshatra Corp. OpenPGP encrypted/signed mail preferred http://www.thevertigo.com
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