Hi! As I mentioned earlier[1] in the bugreport, I had to work with more than one package that could've used dh_apparmor, and that's at least one too many for my taste. So I've been thinking about a way to resolve this situation, and - if possible - avoid similar issues in the future, without polluting the archive with various dh-* packages for no good reason.
It's a shame that debhelper was modified and distributed as it was, and I agree that doing so was (and remains) counter-productive, and something that shouldn't have been done in the first place. However, there are cases where a tool just doesn't make much sense in debhelper proper - at least, not in the beginning (I can list a few scenarios, if any of you is curious). When that happens, it can still be submitted to debhelper for inclusion, but if it's not useful for Debian, and possibly won't be for years to come, does including it in debhelper proper make much sense? I don't think so. BUT! That's no reason to fork debhelper, either. We could have a debhelper-extras, or ubuntu-debhelper-extras or similar, that collects the dh_* tools written for ubuntu or other derivatives, that aren't generally useful for Debian (yet). Packages that need these, be it a Debian package, or one from Ubuntu, or another derivative, could build-depend on this package, and debhelper would remain compatible between derivatives, so would the new package (as it would be uploaded to Debian too, so the derivatives' packages can be built on Debian itself, too). And if and when any of the tools get mature and useful enough, they can still be migrated to debhelper itself, would Joey accept them. This way, debhelper won't be incompatible between distros, nor would be the -extras package, and migration between the two would be reasonably easy. We could start with dh_apparmor (since packaging a single tool like that separately does not make much sense to me), and add others as the need arises. What do you all think? I'm hoping this'd satisfy all parties: those who'd wish to add tools that are - for one reason or the other - not acceptable in debhelper yet, and those who want to see debhelper unchanged between derivatives. [1]: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=649784#35 -- |8] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
