]] Tollef Fog Heen > ]] Sean Whitton > > > The concrete question that I am asking the committee to decide, in my > > capacity as a Policy delegate, is whether or not vendor-specific patch > > series should be permitted in the Debian archive. > > It's now been five days since I mailed the various package > maintainers. I intend to write up a resolution and then call for a vote > in the not-too-distant future, so if there is anything we have not > covered in the discussion so far, please chime in sooner rather than > later
That turned out to be in the rather more distant future than I intended. Apologies about that. A first draft is below, feedback on wording and content appreciated. === DRAFT Resolution === Vendor-specific patch series are a feature of dpkg that can be used to apply a different series of quilt patches when the source package is unpacked on different systems. Since Debian source packages are usually treated as a pure transport format (like tar), this property can cause confusion and frustration for users. Examples could be if only the series file for one vendor is updated, or a source package is unpacked on one system and then transferred to a system with a different vendor for debugging. The Committee recognises that there is a need for packages to behave differently when built on different distributions, but this should be done as part of the build process, using current and future practices such as patches with conditional behaviour, patching of files during the build, rather than at source unpacking time. Since this feature is used by several packages today, we need a reasonable transition period. They will be considered buggy from when this resolution is accepted, but it will not be considered severe enough to warrant immediate removal from Debian. After Buster is released, use of a vender-specific patch series will be a violation of a MUST directive in Debian policy. The Committee therefore resolves that: 1. Any use of dpkg's vendor-specific patch series feature is a bug for packages in the Debian archive (including contrib and non-free). This should be implemented in Debian Policy by declaring that a a package SHOULD NOT contain a non-default series file. 2. After Buster is released, use of the vendor-specific patch series feature is forbidden in the Debian archive. This should be implemented in Debian Policy by declaring that a a package MUST NOT contain a non-default series file. === End DRAFT Resolution === -- Tollef Fog Heen UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are
