Re: [StGit] Debian packaging update

On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 04:16:25PM -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:

On Thu, 28 Aug 2008, Karl Hasselström wrote:

quoted

On 2008-08-28 11:09:29 -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:

quoted

Whatever people told you guys, the sad truth is that for the
overwhelming majority of packages, the mere presence of a debian/
dir upstream is taken as a warning sign by any seasoned Debian
developer (i.e. it is so often a problem, we take it as a bad sign).
It almost never helps. I have no idea where stgit is in that regard,
though. And I have NOT checked the "upstream version of the Debian
packaging", so please don't take this personally.

But I can tell you that most DDs would prefer that upstream dumped
the debian/ dir, unless it is kept *really* current. And really, at
that point, you are losing a lot of the benefits of a downstream
maintainer anyway (i.e. you are not delegating the whole issue to
him, so that you can ignore the packaging and just pay attention to
stgit itself).

Of course, this changes a lot when upstream is also a Debian
developer and spends a few hours per week keeping up-to-date with
Debian policy and toolset changes, etc.

So the optimal solution if we want to carry a debian/ directory (to
allow users to easily build their own .debs, or whatnot) would maybe
be to simply politely ask our Debian maintainer to send us patches or
pull requests to keep it up-to-date?

Yes, but that assumes you release often.  Otherwise users get an old
version of the packaging all the time.

Well, stgit does not require so much packaging change for each
release.  The current debian/ dir in the git repo, while not 100%
uptodate, still allows anyone to build snapshots.

Best regards,
-- 
Yann