On 03/02/18 13:07, Fabian Grünbichler wrote: > > (CC-ing the existing ZoL Debian packaging team, although there is hardly > ever any response there..) > > as an upstream contributor and with my downstream/derivative hat on I > have an alternative proposal: > > I've been pondering cleaning up and pushing the existing Debian > packaging (or some variant thereof) upstream to replace the ugly "build > rpms and use alien + various hacks to get some sort of .deb output" > "build system" that is currently used. > > it seems like upstream is just lacking the people and knowledge to do > this, but it would be welcome (see config/deb.am). would you be > interested in teaming up on this? I think that this is a great idea, and I would definitely like to collaborate on this. I'll start a discussion with you off-list about this. Maybe a feature request on upstream's bug tracker.
> > there are quite a lot of people running git master or the latest 0.7.x > release on some variant of Debian/Ubuntu that get tripped up on every > other release because of missing files and lack of integration into > Debian tooling, probably more than would be willing/able to track > experimental ;) > > this would also have the big upside of being able to integrate the > upstream Debian packaging directly into zfs-buildbot infrastructure, > hopefully keeping most of the packaging-related issues we've seen in the > past from being part of any tagged releases in the future. I was already sold. An automatically up-to-date upstream apt repository would be a great boon for zfsonlinux adoption, and possible, like you're saying. > > the only real downside I see is the fact the the debian/ folder would > need to be excluded when importing stable upstream releases into Debian > proper, in favor of cherry-picking the relevant packaging changes only > as separate commits afterwards (but this is easy with the existing GBP > workflow, and something that a lot of packages with upstream debian/ > folders handle just fine). I still think that getting an experimental package into Debian would improve access to Debian users. Moreover, another (perhaps the most) import objective of my proposal is to *reduce* workload on the existing zfsonlinux team. I'll support any proposal that makes their life easier, and my though is that a continuously up-to-date Debian experimental package that can be directly imported on, e.g., release-day should help out.