Felix Lechner <felix.lech...@lease-up.com> writes: > On Tue, Mar 15, 2022 at 9:33 PM Russ Allbery <r...@debian.org> wrote:
>> We should define native and non-native packages in terms of version >> numbers, and allow both native and non-native packages to use >> single-tarball source package formats. > I co-maintaintain several Debian-internal tools, and that description is > backwards. "Native" sources are characterized by their lack of Debian > patches. This is exactly the semantic confusion that I believe is wrong and we should undo. "Native" vs. "non-native" should be a property of the relationship between the package and a separate upstream release, which is represented in the version. That should be decoupled from the source package format. The point that Ian and Sam are raising is that a single tarball is a good way of representing the Debian package source in several non-native cases where we are still packaging a piece of software with an independent upstream existence, and where having a version with a Debian revision is still semantically correct. > On that note, the term "native" is also not great. The words "patched" > and "unpatched" describe the relationship between sources in the archive > and their respective upstreams more accurately. I think that would add even more confusion. It's very common for non-native packages to switch between patched and unpatched from upload to upload, depending on whether Debian has to carry additional patches, without any change in their version number format or in the source package format. This is correct and should continue to be supported. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
