Hello, On Thu 01 Aug 2019 at 02:35PM +02, Guillem Jover wrote:
> On Thu, 2019-08-01 at 04:37:41 -0700, Sean Whitton wrote: >> On Wed 31 Jul 2019 at 10:53PM +01, Rebecca N. Palmer wrote: >> > Do "complicated and inconvenient" mean "harder to remember than 'git >> > debpush'" (which could equally well be fixed by a local-only script), >> > the confusing errors mentioned below, or something else? >> >> It's a qualitative claim about what it is like to use the tools. We >> think that use of git-debpush imposes much less Debian-specific >> cognitive load on package maintainers. They are just signing and >> pushing a git tag. > > But Debian-specific work requires Debian-specific knowledge. I should have said: Debian-specific source code handling knowledge. I'd like there to be more room in people's minds for Debian-specific knowledge that isn't a matter of moving source code around. >> The sense in which git-debpush & tag2upload have better error handling >> is just that the user's computer is not responsible for any .dsc >> manipulation. This makes it easier to have the correct mental model of >> what's going on, and thus what went wrong. >> >> As soon as .dsc generation is happening on the user's machine, you >> introduce a whole load of stuff which the user has to incorporate into >> their mental model of what's going on with the command they just typed. >> >> You and I basically already have all that stuff in our heads because >> we've been doing Debian stuff for a while. We want experienced >> contributors to be able to discard it, and new contributors not have to >> learn it. > > This argument seems very counter-intuitive. This assumes a > Debian-archive-centric world-view, where most of the heavy lifting is > delegated to some external service. But the reality is that most > maintainers, and other external parties handling Debian sources do > need to handle actual source packages. Requiring people to setup an > equivalent to the Debian archive + dgit service + tag2upload "locally" > just so that they can reduce their cognitive load, seems to be pretty > much the opposite to the above stated goal TBH. Hmm, I'm not sure all that local setup would be needed. You can start with `dgit clone` and work from there. More generally, I think we should aim to replace the use of source packages in all those places too, but there are lots of unsolved problems there. I don't think anyone knows what things are going to look like. tag2upload is meant to encapsulate the use of source packages in one place, as a modest first step towards replacing them elsewhere too. > Personally I'm more interested in simplifying our toolchain and > concepts so that this cognitive load is reduced for everyone/everything. We should do this too, of course :) -- Sean Whitton
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