Dear developers, ABSTRACT How to enable in some special cases a way to allow one source package have multiple maintainers within Debian archive.
RATIONALE There are already a number of packages in the archive which ship sources in a binary package, in some cases this is very useful, so without having to duplicate the sources, there can be multiple maintainers for one source without having to be forced to team up. Ideally, a package should have a binary and a source part, but in some cases it is very useful to provide this kind of packages, as it is the case for GCC/EGLIBC/LINUX/BINUTILS (toolchain) packages, so ADA, JAVA, D or cross compilers do not need to ship sources along the package. So, basically what it is being done by some packages is to build depend on those binaries shipping the source (*-source) to provide tweaked or new binary packages with different configurations. Let's make an example, I would like to have a uClibc cross toolchain, most sources are already in the archive and my changes might be to intrusive to the packages itself, plus I need to talk to different developers to coordinate the effort and rely on their kindness to apply patches for something they might not feel like maintaining. I might also want to generate packages for one architecture which builds for any architecture and have different source packages named uclibc-sh4, uclibc-avr32, uclibc-powerpcspe, uclibc-armel,... Imagine if one needs to ship *same* source per each one on those packages, this is bloating the Debian archive. SOLUTION Approaches I could work on my own without bother anyone could be: a) build depend on *-source binary packages, which it is already a practice and it does not need any infrastructure changes but there is lack of standarization among those packages, some of them ship patches aside with unpatched source, some others patched source, source might be compressed and compression might change from time to time. IMO should it should be fixed and standarized in Debian Policy and have binary -source packages which contain .dsc, .diff.gz, etc. Comments? Other alternatives commented on IRC to be able to allow one source for different maintainers: b) Have one *.orig.tar.gz and allow several *.diff.gz, which it is probably a bad idea, as it requires infrastructure changes and diffs need to be coordinated whenever a new *.orig.tar.gz appears. c) allow build depends on source packages, which it is probably a worst idea. d) team up or die. A list of packages that might be useful to provide in such way I can think of right now are: linux-2.6, eglibc, binutils, gcc-X.Y, gdb, busybox, uclibc, newlib, ... Any comments on standarizing such behaviour in Debian Policy? Best regards, -- Héctor Orón "Our Sun unleashes tremendous flares expelling hot gas into the Solar System, which one day will disconnect us." -- Day DVB-T stop working nicely Video flare: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100510.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/aanlkti==�fe9axvpst_vr+s3ok=vrkhmccf+aka...@mail.gmail.com
