Hi,
it seems to be a trend that maintainers try to change their packages to be
Debian native. Policy says about native packages (in the chapter about
version numbering):
-- snip --
debian_revision
This part of the version number specifies the version of the
Debian package based on the upstream version. It may contain
only alphanumerics and the characters `+' and `.' (plus and full
stop) and is compared in the same way as the upstream_version
is.
It is optional; if it isn't present then the upstream_version
may not contain a hyphen. This format represents the case where
a piece of software was written specifically to be turned into a
Debian package, and so there is only one `debianization' of it
and therefore no revision indication is required.
-- snip --
From this, it should be clear that it's wrong to make a package like xv
where we haven't even the permission to distribute modified binaries
Debian native (see #96458).
It's different when the Debian maintainer is also upstream. It is argued
that then there's only one `debianization'. That's all right but please
consider the following cases before making your package Debian native:
- Do you want to release a new upstream version to fix a missing build
dependency?
- When there's during a freeze a new version in unstable and you fix a bug
in the version in frozen you have to make a split in your upstream
development.
One argument for native packages is that you want to include the debian/
directory in your upstream package. You can do this even in non-native
packages and when you change nothing the .diff.gz will be empty - but it's
possible for you to change only the Debian package without releasing a new
upstream version.
cu
Adrian
--
Nicht weil die Dinge schwierig sind wagen wir sie nicht,
sondern weil wir sie nicht wagen sind sie schwierig.
