I do not support advising against using native packages with our current tooling.
My issue is that for some work flows generating and keeping up with the upstream tarballs significantly increases the frustration of packaging and and brings doing a package update across a pain threshhold that psychologically matters. The idea is that if I can accomplish a task in a minute or two without much frustration, I'll do it more and be happier doing it. If the task takes twice as long, especially when I can't see the value in the steps, resentment builds up, happiness decreases, and the task is done less often. Being able to update packages frequently without frustration is more important to me than the legitimate concerns raised about native packages. I was actually surprised how many legitimate things to think about we came up with while discussing native packages during my DPL term. (There's a pointer from the consensus summary I wrote up to d-d-a.) But at least for me, when I'm trying to closely track a fast moving upstream from a git repo, native packages are just easier. Generating new upstream tarballs for each upstream change, trying to keep track of when I needed to do that, and keeping track of all the upstream tarballs crosses a frustration threshhold for me. Various suggestions were made during previous discussions to make workflows easier. Unfortunately, these suggestions were generally made while dismissing the needs of people favoring native packages. I'll admit that I was frustrated when people were dismissing my concerns enough that it was hard to engage with the suggestions. It's possible there are better work flows I don't know about, but I think there are still gaps. I'd propose the following way forward: 1) Capture the discussion thread we had during my DPL term and the things to think about that were brought up in the native packages part of that discussion. I'm not sure policy is the right place for those; I think some of those might better belong in a wiki page or dev ref. 2) Figure out what the work flow gaps are that cause people to find native packages easier to deal with. I suspect we'll find that something in our git workflows is not great especially for closely tracking upstream git and especially when upstream itself doesn't make releases. 3) Fix these work flow gaps. 4) Then add advice to policy.
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