Sam Hartman writes ("Git Packaging: Native source formats"):
> Internet is faster and disks are cheaper.
> I assert this is much less of a concern than it used to be.
We have some extremely large packages. Also we have users in places
where internet is slow and/or expensive.
Even for medium-sized packages, it is not desirable to constantly ship
copies of the source code about. I want to be able to upload from a
train wifi, or when roaming abroad on hideously expensive mobile data.
Having said that, I do have some packages which have an upstream where
I don't bother with orig tarballs and just use a native format.
> Using native source formats (1.0 and 3.0 (native)) is attractive for
> some git workflows. It means you can just export the git repository and
> don't need to make sure that you use the same upstream tarball when
> upstream versions are the same.
> You don't need to synthesize a separate upstream tarball.
If you already don't care about bit-identical upstream tarballs, then
dealing with these tarballs is a reasonably well-solved problem.
git-deborig etc. FTW.
The real cost of non-native packages is not the few commands you have
to type for your own packages. It's the cognitive and codebase cost
of knowing how to deal with them, particularly when you're not the
maintainer. Especially, `3.0 (quilt)' is very complex. So we would
gain something if we could get rid of non-native packages *entirely*.
But we can't.
Note that many maintainers use a bare debian ("packaging only")
packaging workflow which doesn't work (at least with current tooling)
without orig tarballs. You'll have seen messages where some of those
people say they think that is the only tolerable approach.
> I'd like to understand the downsides to doing this:
You have been a bit vague about what exactly you are proposing. If
you are just proposing that native packages should be a strong
recommendation then the benefits are IMO too weak.
OTOH if people feel they "shouldn't" use a native source format for a
small package for some reason, I think that would be worth fixing.
One thing I would like to see changed in this area: some of our tools
issue warnings about packages with a non-native version, but a native
source format. I think there is nothing wrong with this and it should
not be discouraged and doesn't merit a warning. (There is an
awkardness here in that you can sometimes unintentionally generate a
native format source package if your origs are missing...)
HTH.
Ian.
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Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> These opinions are my own.
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