On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 11:49:25AM +0200, Niels Thykier wrote:
> Personally I believe that Noel's statement is relates to upstream,
> who have their own packaging + their own little repository as
> compared to upstreams like you, who also work on the Debian side.
[...]
Which was more or less my point as well...
I have my own packaging and I publish it in my own repository too.
However, I spent and continue to spend a disproportionate amount of
time making sure my packaging is correct for the Debian project as a
whole (to a great extent because Debian is also my preferred
operating system and the primary reference platform on which I
develop and test my software). I do that by getting my packaging
peer-reviewed on the mentors list, having an official DD upload my
packages once he's comfortable with the level of effort I've
applied, keeping up with Debian's BTS, participating in discussions
here and on debian-devel, et cetera.
In contrast, the packaging I've seen provided by upstreams who don't
actually put forth the effort to get involved to that degree are
pretty much always non-compliant with Debian standards... many FTBFS
on sid (if they even publish source packages at all), most do not
have proper Debian.changelogs with BTS-relevant closes fields, lots
are ignorant of the FHS or more Debian-specific policy directives,
few run them through QA filters like lintian or test their builds in
clean chroots... I won't even bother to enumerate the more
scary/egregious/brain-dead packaging no-nos I've seen from some.
I expect it would be less work for a seasoned DD or DM to simply
disregard the upstream-provided packaging and redo it from scratch
than try to hunt through it for those kinds of land mines. If it
were my software and I weren't submitting my own packaging work
directly into Debian, I wouldn't take it personally if the package
maintainer scrapped my unofficial packaging work and replaced it
with his own.
> On a related note, while an experienced DD (or non-DD for that
> matter) may make a "better" debian package most of them would
> still be an inferior maintainer. All bug reports are handled by
> one who knows the code and the latency of forwarding upstream bugs
> is ... 0!
A lot of that has to do more generally with the responsiveness of
the upstream developers. I personally take bug reports from any
distribution's users of my software seriously, whether or not they
come through the package maintainers. Though I also work a day job
where I constantly get bombarded by harebrained requests from
clueless users, so I'm used to handling some of the worst sorts of
end-user interaction with a smile and a nod (and the open-source
community is more competent and much easier to deal with than my
day-job customers anyway).
Faster bug triage and awareness of upstream software's development
process aside, I still expect DDs who constantly deal with
maintenance of a broad variety of packages have a more useful
perspective on distribution-wide integration which I lack.
> Personally I think you should have an extra look at the DM role.
> You may not be ready for it just yet, but I think aiming for it
> would be an improvement for you. :)
[...]
It's been on my to do list to look into, but I haven't yet gone out
of my way to pinopint any of my local DDs... no doubt there are many
here near RTP where I live, even though Raleigh is more of a Red Hat
town. I figured I'd revisit the DM process once I found an
opportunity to get a DD signature or two on my key. Also, lack of
some official status hasn't yet been an obstacle for contributing to
Debian in a variety of other ways, so I haven't seen it as a
particularly immediate need. On the other hand, given that I've been
participating in the project in an unofficial capacity for over a
decade, maybe it's time.
Thanks for the suggestion and kind words!
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