Patch Tagging Guidelines standardized in Debian as DEP3

[Colin Watson]

On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 11:10:56AM +0200, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> I'd like to bring to your attention an ongoing discussion in Debian. I
> drafted a Debian Enhancement Proposal (DEP) to formalize something similar
> in spirit to
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/PatchTaggingGuidelines
> 
> The end result is likely to not be 100% compatible to your format. So you
> might want to check it out and ensure it meets your needs as well as those
> of Debian. I think it is an improvement over your format (as it also tries
> to be more vendor-agnostic) and as such the small burden of having to
> convert progressively the meta-information in your patch is not a big
> deal.
> 
> Check out the discussion here:
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/06/msg00458.html

You say "dash" ('-') in a couple of places where you mean "hash" ('#').

I don't expect a general problem with us migrating to new field names or
whatever; I believe that at the moment we're mostly using our patch tags
informationally for the reference of people working on individual
packages, rather than in any kind of mass-scanning way.

I'd caution against overengineering this kind of specification up-front.
Conventional names for the same concepts are good, but I wouldn't get
carried away with things like mandatory origin values, which fields are
required and which aren't, etc. Getting people to document (and
forward!) patches at all seems a lot more important.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]