On Sat, 17 Aug 2024 at 22:45:59 +0200, Chris Hofstaedtler wrote:
> "latest" is illnamed. What do you expect to find in a branch thats
> called debian/latest?
>
> Packaging for unstable? For experimental?
For experimental if there's currently a version in experimental (or if
there is about to be one in the near future), or unstable otherwise.
Some maintainers and teams strongly prefer to have one branch for either
unstable or experimental, whichever is the current target for uploads
with the latest development. For example, the GNOME team does this:
a new upstream release from upstream's 'main' branch might go to either
unstable or experimental, depending on its perceived stability, whether
it involves a SONAME bump or other transition, and where we are in the
Debian release cycle; but either way, it gets there via debian/latest.
If that's what is happening, then debian/latest is an appropriate name for
that single branch, but neither debian/unstable nor debian/experimental
would always be correct, because uploads from debian/latest can go in
either of those directions.
(In the GNOME team's case, if GNOME 47 prereleases are already in
debian/latest and experimental, but a new GNOME-46-based upload becomes
necessary to fix bugs in testing/unstable and the GNOME-47-based release
isn't ready yet, we'll use a relatively short-lived debian/unstable or
debian/trixie branch for that.)
> What if both evolve in parallel? Yes, some packages do that.
If that's the case then using debian/latest for uploads to unstable would
be inappropriate, because those uploads are not, in fact, the latest.
There are two valid approaches to this. One is to use be debian/unstable
and debian/experimental (like I do in src:flatpak and src:dbus), and not
have a debian/latest branch at all. The other is to use debian/latest
for experimental, and debian/unstable (or possibly debian/trixie) for
uploads to unstable, more like way the GNOME team works.
DEP-14 allows either of those approaches.
smcv
