(I'm creating a new thread rather than replying to a particular message,
because my mail is not at all personal. It's a general tendency amongst
many debian-mentors reviewers that I'm going to rant about.)
A sponsor on 2011-07-08, 11:22 wrote:
1. You're using debhelper compat 7 and also only debhelper >= 7.0.50~
as Build-Depends. Please bump that to 8
Seriously? Is the sponsor suggesting that one should be build-depending
on a newer version, even though one does not use any features of the
newer one?
(I'm currently working on a package that (build-)depends on
python-docutils (>= 0.5). This version is quite old, it was released in
2008, just like debhelper 7.0. Would it make sense if I suddenly bumped
the dependency to >= 0.7? Or maybe even to >= 0.7-2~, since upstream
recommends using their svn version, and 0.7-2 have some patches
backported?)
Also, the sponsor failed to explain that normally upgrading debhelper
compat is not a matter of bumping a number here and there. First you
should read carefully the "Debhelper compatibility levels" chapter in
debhelper(1) manpage and see how the changes could affect the package,
adapt your packaging to the new compat level, then bump debian/compat,
then build and test your package. That's a potentially time consuming
and error-prone process.
Dear reviewers, next time if you are going to complain about:
- debian/compat being "too low";
- debian/rules not using dh (or not using cdbs);
- debian/copyright not in DEP-5 format;
- source format not 3.0 (quilt) when there are no patches whatsoever;
please think twice. Most likely, you are doing it wrong.
Don't get me wrong, in my opinion (some of) these things are "good". But
making a big fuss about them is not helping anybody. It only distracts
attention from things that are important, and creates false impression
that they are somehow crucial for high quality packages. I can assure,
they are not.
--
Jakub Wilk
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