I would like to ask current official dpkg maintainers what they plan
to do about triggers, and about my status with respect to the dpkg
team.
Triggers are IMO an important and very useful new dpkg feature. They
were first proposed many many years ago and discussed between Wichert
and myself. A detailed specification was extensively discussed on
debian-dpkg (with announcements on debian-devel) between January and
April 2007. The implementation has been complete since August 2007
and stable in widespread production use since October 2007.
There is in my opinion no reason why this code should not be merged
into sid's dpkg immediately - although there may be some merge
conflicts by now. (I haven't been playing merge catch-up since I
don't presently feel that my changes are going to be accepted.)
During some of the discussions surrounding my return to dpkg
development, the view was expressed that I ought to do some work to
persuade particularly Guillem Jover of my usefulness and competence.
I was encouraged by various members of the current dpkg maintenance
team to pull my weight by doing some bug triage and fixing.
So I did this and there are about half a dozen bugfixes to the main
dpkg C code which I published but I have not been very encouraged by
the response. Since then I have been generally keeping up with the
mailing lists (in my usual batch mode style) and contributing where it
seemed appropriate. However I haven't been motivated to do any
significant amount of development work.
I request that the current dpkg maintainers formally reinstate me as a
maintainer of the package, and that they agree that I should merge my
triggers branch, and other fixes, into the main dpkg git tree so that
it may be uploaded.
I would like to see this happen without getting into bikeshedding
about the proper use of git (and without pointless revision log
polishing and without history-losing merges).
On the other hand, I do not intend to disrupt the other ongoing work
of the dpkg team and do not expect to be put in charge.
Ian.
Relevantly, the history of triggers is:
30 Jan 2007 - I post my first draft specification.
Discussion ensues, resulting in many imporant changes.
1 Mar 2007 - I post my second draft.
10 Apr 2007 - I repost because everyone had been too busy to comment.
More discussion, including again important feedback.
30 Apr 2007 - I post a `final' draft spec. Some necessary
improvements to the transition plan are pointed out,
but the dpkg functional specification seems solid.
15 Aug 2007 - I announce that I have completed the implementation.
There is no patch yet because it's based on the Ubuntu
version of dpkg.
17 Auy 2007 - I submit bugs against apt (#438547) and aptitutde
(#438548) giving patches for the consequential changes.
17 Aug 2007 - I merge the triggers work with Debian's dpkg and
publish the results as a git tree suitable (IMO) for
merging, although I do warn that there are likely
to be some more bugfixes as a result of testing.
9 Oct 2007 - I tell Colin Watson that testing in Ubuntu has been
basically successful and that the interfaces are now
stable, so Colin should go ahead and use triggers in
man-db (the changes are upwards-compatible) and that
Debian's dpkg should have triggers straight away.
Guillem Jover expresses scepticism, saying that Debian
should not `blindly merge any such code drops'.
17 Oct 2007 - I tender my resignation to Canonical. This is not
directly relevant IMO but my connection with Ubuntu
seems to have been colouring some opinions, so I mention
it here.
22 Oct 2007 - I give a status summary, restate the availability of the
triggers branch, and giving some transitional
approaches.
22 Oct 2007 - I file bugs suggesting triggerisation of ldconfig
(#447609) and (#447611), with patches. Some discussion
follows.
24 Oct 2007 - Raphael Hertzog asks me to `git-rebase', edit the email
address in my git commit logs, and so forth, allegedly
in order to make my changes easier to review. At the
time I was reliably informed by git experts that
published branches should not be rebased. As a rather
more experienced git user it seems clear to me now that
I was right to resist. (I do have one other branch with
major changes which is a sub-branch off the triggers
branch, and that too has been published.)
See the archives of debian-dpkg for the gory details.
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