Ubuntu bug reporting (reportbug, dpkg origins)

Matt Zimmerman mdz at canonical.com
Mon Nov 1 11:23:25 CST 2004


On Mon, Nov 01, 2004 at 09:38:50AM +0100, Wichert Akkerman wrote:
> Previously Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > Some issues regarding this approach:
> > 
> > - We would need to carry this patch to dpkg forever
> 
> No you don't. dpkg will most likely never change that file again (it
> certainly has not changed since it was introduced). So you can create it
> once in your installer and then completely forget about it.

That file is a conffile owned by dpkg, not something created by the
installer.  Even if we modified it in the installer, that would miss
installs done by hand with debootstrap, and upgrades from Woody, both of
which are quite common.

> > - It has a cosmetic side effect of the bug being submitted to "Debian Bug
> >   Tracking System <...address of Ubuntu bug tracking system...>", unless we
> >   also change the Vendor field in origins/debian, which seems like the wrong
> >   thing to do otherwise
> > 
> > - An explicit "reportbug --bts debian" would still cause the report to go to
> >   Ubuntu
> 
> Those two sounds like bugs in reportbug.

I'm not so sure.  We're redefining the 'debian' BTS, and reportbug is
honoring that, when what we really want is to point to a different BTS for
all packages.

> > This seems like something we should obviously do, regardless of the bug
> > reporting issue.  Since it doesn't overlap with Debian, it could presumably
> > be merged into dpkg mainline, and we could avoid carrying a patch.
> 
> I would prefer to have that file be part of another package. A ubuntu
> version of base-files sounds like a good candidate.

Sounds reasonable.

> > We should set Origin: ubuntu or similar in the control file of
> > Ubuntu-specific packages.  Thoughts?
> 
> I would prefer to have that field in all ubuntu-modified package. That
> way at some point in the future we can use the Origin field instead of
> the archive location to distinguish between package versions.

That would create work for us, since it's an additional modified file to
merge, and one which changes rather often.  Perhaps we need a different way
to set the origin, such as a debian/origin file, which is more easily
automated and merged.

-- 
 - mdz



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