[ Moving this to debian-devel, discussion doesn't belong in the bug report. ]
James Troup wrote:
> There is no i386 port in as much as i386 maintainers 99.5% of the time
> _don't_ compile packages from scratch, which is when over 50% of the
> problems (at least on m68k, and judging by the diff's I've seen from
> Paul, similar-ish on alpha) show up.
I don't get it. How do people upload a new version of a package w/o
compiling it from scratch?
> FWIW, I don't like binary-only NMUs either as they do mean duplication
> as each port fixes the same (usually lame) packaging bug, but I
> realise their necessity (what Paul says is true; if we waited for
> source maintainers to integrate fixes, we would get nowhere very
> fast).
I seem to be hearing the argument that binary-only NMU's can be made without
waiting, while a normal NMU requires that you wait for the maintainer to
have a reasonable time to do something about a bug report. I don't
understand why this would be so. Why are binary-only NMU's special?
Seems to me like they're both just NMU's, and that binary-only NMU's are not
as good as normal NMU's because they don't make it easy to share fixes
between architectures, so I don't see why they should be made at all. [1]
--
see shy jo
[1] I recognize the value of binary-only NMU's when a new port is being
started and you can't afford to wait on the maintainer, and you may need
to make a lot of changes, and your build environment may be non-standard.
But as a port matures, their value decreses. I think porters are mostly
making binary-only NMU's now out of tradition.
