New software created for Ubuntu

[Raphael Hertzog]

On Tue, 04 May 2010, Dmitrijs Ledkovs wrote:
> > As far as dpkg goes, that's mostly the case. Ubuntu still has a diff but
> > it gets smaller over time. We hope to be able to sync it directly at some
> > point.
> 
> Would it be quicker if the ubuntu diff lived in the dpkg git repo as a
> branch and you would try to merge it and if it's non-trivial merge or
> breaks behaviour ping ubuntu folks?

No, it's not a matter of grabbing the changes. Some changes are due to
version skew, they will auto-disappear in due time. Some changes are
due to choices made by Colin, I expect they will be reverted if they are
the only changes. Some changes are already merged in our git repo (dist
compiler flags). Some changes (hardening wrapper integration) requires
further work to have a proper solution in place and not a quick hack.

> > Well, I have no problem with you uploading them as native packages
> > to Debian directly as well. It's just that using native packages is more
> > difficult when Debian is not the real upstream... we would have to create
> > new upstream versions to fix debian-specific issues.
> 
> The issues with native package versions in general are NMU and binNMU.

Well, there are many reasons why using native packages is not advisable
when the upstream is not Debian. You mentionned some of them.

Your comparison assumed Debian and Ubuntu are on par, while this might be
true for an outsider, in reality packages flow from Debian to Ubuntu
mainly and this has implications like the above.

We have to live with that. There's nothing to be worried about this
situation.

> And since now dpkg has no problem throwing away upstream debian/
> packaging does it makes sence to abolish native packages as a whole?

I don't see why it would be related. And dpkg must be backwards-compatible
so removing features is not really a good idea in general.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog

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