-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Thomas Viehmann wrote:
> Matt Zimmerman wrote: >> It is important, in particular, to account for the fact that Ubuntu is not >> the only Debian derivative, and that proposals like yours would amount to >> Debian derivatives being obliged to fork *every source package in Debian* >> for the sake of changing a few lines of text. > > Yeah, and it seems unreasonable to suggest that anyone should be > hindered to ship unmodified source packages as just that. > In fact, Debian does try to ship unmodified upstream source tarballs, > why shouldn't other people ship unmodified Debian source packages? I see no problems with Ubuntu (or anyone) shipping unmodified Debian *source* packages. The problem comes in when they also ship *binary* packages that are built in a different way from those in Debian (due to different libraries, different default compiler, etc.) This may cause bugs in the rebuilt binaries that don't appear in Debian. If the package maintainer is left as the Debian maintainer, s/he gets blame for these bugs. This isn't a hypothetical. One of my packages (binary package paw, from source package cernlib) has seriously broken functionality in Breezy because it was compiled with a buggy version of gcc. The breakage did not appear in Debian until later [1], since Ubuntu switched to gcc-3.4 before Debian switched from 3.3 to 4.0. Once the breakage occurred in Debian I promptly uploaded a workaround and filed a bug on gcc [2]. Since paw is not very widely used, no one was bitten by the bug in Ubuntu until recently. An Ubuntu user emailed me about it [3] upon finding my name in the package maintainer field (and also asked upstream about it). If the Maintainer field included something like ubuntu-motu@lists.ubuntu.com, instead of keeping my name and email, I imagine the question would have worked its way to me eventually, but without first making it look like I must be clueless not to have fixed such an obvious bug. I think this explains my preference for the package maintainer listed in Debian-derivative distributions to be changed even for otherwise unmodified source packages. To avoid forking source packages, maybe Ubuntu could cause the maintainer field to be changed in the binary packages by small modifications to the build tools, as suggested elsewhere in this thread. References: [1] the Debian bug report on paw: http://bugs.debian.org/324902 [2] the Debian bug report I filed on gcc: http://bugs.debian.org/325050 [3] the Ubuntu bug report on paw: https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/cernlib/+bug/6588 (the user who filed the bug was nice enough to add my emailed response to him as the second reply in the Launchpad entry) regards, - -- Kevin B. McCarty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Physics Department WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFDznBAfYxAIk+Dx1ERAo4cAJ499RHFSidcqaEDJ5di1RjgjyY0lgCeLnUe PA4h/GldEUM87WqtMGGHWDI= =j1wG -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
