Chris Hofstaedtler <z...@debian.org> writes: > On Fri, 16 Aug 2024 23:36:31 +0200, gregor herrmann wrote: >> IMO, and from discussions in the Debian Perl Group, the blocker is >> the conversion of existing repos, both on salsa (which should be >> doable via the API as suggested in the sketches mentioned above) and >> also locally for hundreds of developer machines [git fails horribly >> on the upstream/ → upstream/latest change]. > > I want to echo this pain. When changing the layout it seems almost > better to start from scratch. > > Additionally, in my opinion debian/latest is a mistake we should not > recommend.
+1 I'm happily working on packages with many different git styles, and I'm building packages for different suites and vendors: the 'debian/latest' naming style has not contributed to my work flow. I do understand the original rationale, I think, since it feels ugly to put an experimental upload on a debian/unstable git branch. However I think there are two kind of experimental uploads that are different in nature: 1) uploads to experimental that test things intended for sid quite soon (maybe architecture build testing like we just did for 'libmceliece'), and 2) complete odd-ball uploads that is known to break things, but needed for some other experimentation that may be multi-months while there could be uploads going into unstable (like we did for the Go grpc package during the last months). I believe for the use-case 1) it is better to use debian/unstable immediately and for 2) it is better to have one branch debian/unstable and one branch debian/experimental. I'm missing what positive effects arise from using a debian/latest branch. Maybe this could be clarified in DEP14 that 'debian/latest' is only recommended for use instead of 'debian/unstable' for 1)-style uploads. I still wonder if it is actually wortwhile to rescue 'debian/latest' though. I've often used 'debian/unstable' instead for this purpose, since the 1)-style uploads are not uncommon for me. I think the core problem is that there really is no reasonable concept of "latest" branch for a Debian package. There are just many different versions targetted at different suites or vendors, each of them having their own meaning of what is latest. /Simon
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
