Joey Hess <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > [ Moving this to debian-devel, discussion doesn't belong in the bug report. ]
[ Killed the Cc: line. ] > James Troup wrote: > > There is no i386 port in as much as i386 maintainers 99.5% of the time > > _don't_ compile packages from scratch, which is when over 50% of the > > problems (at least on m68k, and judging by the diff's I've seen from > > Paul, similar-ish on alpha) show up. > > I don't get it. How do people upload a new version of a package w/o > compiling it from scratch? They don't compile from freshly unpacked source. Problems which aren't noticed are, for example, a debian/rules clean which depends on debian/rules build having at least partially run, or a debian/rules which depends on something in debian/* being executable (when dpkg-source -x only makes debian/rules executable). Another thing is that i386 maintainers _won't_ notice is two of our most common problems: YAFHIC386 in debian/control's Architecture and debian/files not being removed during debian/rules clean. There really isn't an i386 port. > I seem to be hearing the argument that binary-only NMU's can be made without > waiting, while a normal NMU requires that you wait for the maintainer to > have a reasonable time to do something about a bug report. I don't > understand why this would be so. Because I refuse to wait for maintainers who take weeks and weeks (if not months or years [This was actually the case till Guy finally purged the old style source format packages]) to respond to trivial bugs; there is no reason why non-i386 users and developers should be held up by slow-to-respond i386/source maintainers, when we have already done the work and found the fix for their bugs. > [1] I recognize the value of binary-only NMU's when a new port is being > started and you can't afford to wait on the maintainer, Eh? Why should a port be able to afford to wait on i386-maintainers just because it's no longer new? > and you may need to make a lot of changes, All ports needs to make a lot of changes because so many source packages are broken. It's got little or nothing to do with the newness of the port (if you look at the {binary-,}NMU's and bug reports, they aren't predominantly from the new ports, but rather the older ones (m68k && alpha)). > and your build environment may be non-standard. Eh? Define ``standard'', please? I rather hope you don't mean "what i386 uses". > But as a port matures, their value decreses. Says who and why? > I think porters are mostly making binary-only NMU's now out of > tradition. No, it's not tradition at all, I simply want to get things done. If I find a bug in a package I'm compiling for m68k, I will fix it, and forward the patch to the BTS. I've done this for years and will continue to do it, unless someone provides me with a) a better system and/or b) reasons not to. -- James [Bah, gnus' auto-signature erasure is a PITA when footnotes below the signature are used]