[Sugar-devel] [SoaS] Policy for activities for downstream inclusion

[Simon Schampijer]

On 09/15/2010 03:22 PM, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 07:28:05AM -0500, David Farning wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 4:47 AM, Sascha Silbe
>> <sascha-ml-reply-to-2010-3 at silbe.org> wrote:
>>> Excerpts from Simon Schampijer's message of Tue Sep 14 16:14:08 +0200
>>> 2010:
>>>
>>>> >> In the .deb side of the universe, we prefer tarballs but we can
>>>> >> work directly from the git repository.
>>>>
>>>> We should not go from the git repository. Either use the .xo or a
>>>> tarball.
>>>
>>> Why? And who is "we" in this case?
>>
>> For the entire 'why' I will have to refer you to the the Debain
>> mailing lists. /me ducks The short answer is Debian packaging is
>> premised on the idea of a 'pristine source' which historically has
>> been a publicly available tarball. Over the last couple of years Jonas
>> has modified the CDBS (Common Debian Build System) to grab from a
>> properly tagged git repo.
>
> I want to clarify a bit here:
>
> Debian still very much favor tarballs. If upstreams do not ship
> tarballs, we need to create a tarball ourselves as part of our packaging
> efforts.
>
> This is bad in my opinion, as there is a higher risk of introducing
> errors that can go unnoticed: If repackaging accidentally adds, alters
> or skips some files, then the distributor is unlikely to notice because
> it is treated as upstream code, and obviously upstream is unlikely to
> notice too since in fact the (altered) code never appeared upstream.
>
> For the Sugar packages in Debian I have gone beyond the minimal
> requirements in Debian (which includes that mandatory tarball!) in also
> tracking upstream Git. I do *not* like redistributing directly from Git,
> and have in the past raised my concern about David Farning and his team
> of Ubuntu developers packaging directly from Git rather than pushing
> upstream (i.e. you Sugar guys) to always release tarballs.

Thanks Jonas for sharing your downstream experience!

I absolutely agree that repackaging tarballs is calling for errors. 
Besides that - I mean doing a tarball is that easy and makes the live of 
the packagers so much simpler - tbh I don't even know why we have to 
talk about that over and over again.

Can we get over this and just make it a policy that maintainers do 
tarballs and make it visible?

Regards,
    Simon