Hi, On 14/05/19 at 14:30 -0400, Sam Hartman wrote: > I think there's a fairly clear consensus emerging that it's worth having > things to check when making a build system conversion. Looking at > debdiff, ditherscope and reproducibility of the build all appear to be > important things to consider in such a case. > > So, I think there is an emerging consensus against the idea of people > NMUing a package simply to convert it to dh. > > First, I'd like to explicitly call for any last comments from people who would > like to see us permit NMUs simply to move packages toward dh. Are there > any cases in which such an NMU should be permitted?
Our NMU policy (Sec 5.11.1 of developers-reference[1]) tries hard to give some standards of when and how it's acceptable to do an NMU. It is complex, but in the end, I think that it boils down to: NMUs are always permitted, but discouraged in some (many?) cases, and extensive use of the DELAYED queue is recommended. It also explicitely discourages NMUs for packaging style changes: > Fixing cosmetic issues or changing the packaging style (e.g. switching > from cdbs to dh) in NMUs is discouraged. Do you want to change this and explicitely forbid NMUs for converting to dh? I think that the current policy is quite balanced (but I'm biaised since I contributed to its adoption a long time ago :) ). I also think that we should trust the judgement of DDs, and that completely forbidding some changes via NMUs would be a regression compared to the current policy. - Lucas [1] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/ch05.en.html#nmu