Strawman: eliminating debdiffs

[Martin Pitt]

Colin Watson [2008-10-09 13:59 +0100]:
> I'm going to reply to a number of points made throughout this thread,

Thanks for your wonderfully thought-out reply.

> I generally like the patch tagging guidelines
> (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/PatchTaggingGuidelines); they
> make a lot of sense when you're using a patch system. Of course, not
> everything does (I avoid them like the plague wherever possible, and in
> native packages they're just silly). In that case I think the changelog
> is quite adequate, and it doesn't have to get very long. A simple change
> I committed while writing this mail was pretty much the worst case:
> 
>   * ssh-copy-id: Strip trailing colons from hostname (closes: #226172,
>     LP: #249706; thanks to Karl Goetz for nudging this along; forwarded
>     upstream as https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1530).

I agree, when there is not patch system, putting all the upstream
links into the changelog is the right thing to do. I just personally
don't do it *if* I applied a patch, since I find changelogs without
tons of long URLs much easier to read. The target audience is
primarily technically interested users, and not people
grabbing/forwarding patches; for the latter, having all the links in
the patch itself is much more helpful anyway IMHO.

> > One issue is that the contributor won't necessarily get record of their
> > work on their /+packages page. The sponsor could use their details in
> > the changelog footer, but some sponsors may not like that as they did
> > the work of pulling the fix in to the package.
> 
> This issue is only going to become more extensive as it becomes more
> common to have multiple changes in a single upload (which is already
> prevalent in main; it's rare for me to integrate a change from a
> contributor and upload it without also including something else),
> particularly with packages in revision control. We're going to have to
> wean ourselves off measuring people according to +packages sooner or
> later.

Just keeping the contributor as the bug assignee (instead of assigning
it to ourselves when we sponsor the package) should also help a great
deal with keeping a record of someone's contributions.

Martin
-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)