Hi, On Sat, 28 Jul 2018, Colin Watson wrote: > > Debian should not seek to prevent maintainers doing something that > > they have agreed to do in collaboration with downstreams. > > My memory of the origin of this feature is that the dpkg developer who > originated it asked me if it might help with upstreaming changes from > Ubuntu to Debian, I said something along the lines of "uh, maybe, I > guess, it sounds like that would have some problems?", and then they > went ahead and did it. I don't *think* it was originally a request that > came from derivatives, and I don't remember the sort of collaborative > design that I think you're suggesting here.
As the person who implemented this vendor-specific patch series, I have to recognize that it was a bad idea. It was easy to implement and at that time looked like something possibly useful to encourage more collaboration between Debian an Ubuntu. But I agree with most of the critics that I have read and I believe that we should forbid its use in Debian. Now I'm no longer involved in dpkg, I don't know if Guillem is willing to deprecate the feature. But at least it should be forbidden at the policy level. Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer Support Debian LTS: https://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html Learn to master Debian: https://debian-handbook.info/get/
