Hi, On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 08:33:44AM -0400, Sam Hartman wrote: > I'd like to call out one specific thing from Andreas's quote and the > general argument. It's the belief that we've reached a point where in > some cases uniformity is more important than maintainer preference.
I second this. With my cross/bootstrap maintainer hat (it's not an official hat, but I think I have this hat at this point in time), I can say that this uniformity is key to making archive-wide change feasible. During my work on cross/bootstrap, I've sent more than 1500 patches. I guess that almost half of those were one of: * use dh_auto_configure * use dh_auto_build * don't strip before dh_strip * bump debhelper compat level In other words, a significant chunk of packages would have just worked had they used debhelper. On top of that, I observed that a fair number of broken packages had one other bug "please make the build reproducible". I would be surprised if the reproducible experience is much different from mine. Maintainer preference has a real cost to the project and that cost needs to be measured in weeks or months, not minutes. Due to the added friction I've generally avoided fixing packages that were using cdbs or no debhelper at all. My personal view is that we should stop using cdbs entirely, but I'm not sure that consensus is achievable on this point. This is a statement towards the general direction. I have no good idea how to turn that into policy or the like. Given my little experience with Haskell packages, I would exempt the haskell ecosystem from a rule. Hope this helps as a data point Helmut