Re: packaging policy

[Gregory Leblanc <gleblanc linuxweasel com>]

Ah-ha!  A debian dude!  :)

On Mon, 2002-04-01 at 11:25, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 01, 2002 at 09:17:24AM -0500, David Merrill wrote:
> > There is a subdir of there called debian/ which contains lots of
> > control files that tell dpkg how to build the package. I feel these
> > should go into the cvs. The build system is a part of the code, after
> > all.
> 
> Opinion among Debian developers about this is rather divided. (Isn't
> everything?) I feel that putting the debian/ directory into CVS makes
> life difficult when, as often happens, the Debian maintainer becomes a
> different person from the upstream maintainer, so I prefer to keep
> Debian-specific files and changes out of CVS. It's also simpler to have
> the whole debian/ directory in the .diff.gz, because at the moment it
> isn't possible to delete files in the Debian diff. None of my packages
> have the Debian build system in the upstream CVS repository.

This is starting to stray off topic, ignore if you're not interested in
packaging issues.

Opinion varies across all developers, AFAICT.  I've still got people
opposed to doing this for GNOME.  The advantages offered by maintaining
packaging data in CVS are mostly apparent for complex projects, like
GNOME.  Nautilus (the GNOME file manager), depends on a whole slew of
other GNOME packages.  It checks for all of these in configure.in.  If,
in the course of writing these tests, the developers put in lines that
reads something like 

GLIB_REQUIRED=2.0.1
AC_SUBST(GLIB_REQUIRED)

Then, when writing out the dependencies in the packaging definitions, I
don't have to worry about what version is actually required, as it gets
filled in when the upstream maintainer changes the version number. 
Thoughts?
	Greg

-- 
Portland, Oregon, USA.