Adrian Bunk: > On Sun, May 26, 2019 at 11:34:39AM +0200, Vincent Bernat wrote: >> ... >> We have a reputation of having difficult >> packaging practices. We uphold this reputation as long as we have so >> many ways to do the same thing. > > [citation needed] > > I do honestly not know what statements/comparisons from people outside > Debian are the basis for this claim, and whether making dh more mandatory > is even related to them. > > [...] > > Often the most difficult part of packaging are the unique rules the > Debian ftp team requires for debian/copyright that are not required in > distributions with actual lawyers. That's a completely separate topic. > > It is perfectly possible that there is something else I am not aware > of, and you are assuming everyone in this discussion is. > > It would therefore be really useful if you could send some links to > statements from people outside Debian *why* they consider Debian to > have difficult packaging practices.
Unfortunately I don't have *links* either, but when introducing people into the world of Debian packaging recently, I always got the impression that they were heavily overwhelmed by the complexity of the Debian ecosystem. Depending on the software you packages, doing the initial packaging already requires a lot of knowledge about library handling, doc build systems, makefiles, the filesystem hierarchy standard, language-specific toolchains, etc. To properly build the package you have to learn either sbuild or pbuilder. Which involves understanding and creating chroots/VMs/... For proper version controlling, things like git-buildpackage (and/or dgit) and the "3.0 (quilt)" format need to be understood. And for testing, you need to learn about piuparts, autopkgtest, as well as again chroots and/or containers for local testing. That's a very high bar for entering the world of Debian packaging. My opinion is that more uniformity in packaging practices will bring a bit more simplicity as well. Therefore I applaud Sam's initiative to require DH whereever it's sensible. I think that Debian would gain a lot if the vast majority of packages were packaged using DH and development would happen in Git on Salsa using a common Git format. I agree that there should be exceptions. Cheers jonas
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