Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 6, 2019 21:07 UTC (Thu) by rweikusat2 (subscriber, #117920)
In reply to: Seeking consensus on dh by rahulsundaram
Parent article: Seeking consensus on dh

> No, his point goes beyond that.

I wasn't addressing more than what I wrote about, namely, the supposed "impossibility" to work with packages one didn't create due to all of these different "styles": It's perfectly possible and - in fact - even common-place that "a small number of maintainers work with a large number of packages" in Debian, there's even a procedure for that called NMU (non-maintainer upload), usually employed for fixes which are considered urgent, IOW, security issues, these being done by a dedicated team of people.

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Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 7, 2019 0:58 UTC (Fri) by martin.langhoff (guest, #61417) [Link] (8 responses)

It's possible but the cognitive load is 10x due to diverse styles and tools.

It's a cultural thing.

When a codebase is managed by entrenched developers who refuse a common style, this is what you get.

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 7, 2019 14:49 UTC (Fri) by rweikusat2 (subscriber, #117920) [Link] (7 responses)

This "cognitive load" negligent to non-existant. Either a package is trivial. Then, understanding it will be trivial as well. Or it's not. In that case, there'll be a lot of package-specific things which will necessarily differ, with the package building tools being a very small portion of that.

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 7, 2019 15:21 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> In that case, there'll be a lot of package-specific things which will necessarily differ, with the package building tools being a very small portion of that.

With my over a decade of experience maintaining dozens and dozens of packages for an upstream distribution, consistency of package building tools matter a lot to people maintaining the distribution day in and day out. I wouldn't call that a small portion at all especially when you are bringing in new contributors.

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 7, 2019 15:34 UTC (Fri) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (5 responses)

I disagree: there's more to packaging a distribution than touching a single package.

Suppose you want to fix a somewhat-trivial problem with your packaging like, for instance, replacing "/var/run" with "/run". Or, say, change the default flags of the compiler for more hardening. Or … well, whatever.

With "dh" this is a no-brainer. You update its defaults, rebuild the whole archive, and file bugs where that fails.
With trivial rpm specfile, this is also a no-brainer. More likely than not, there's a field for what you're trying to do, or a default value in RPM. Update it, rebuild the package, file a bug when that fails.

With anything nonstandard, you can't do that – your understanding does not translate well to a "sed" command, trivial package or not.
Even if the cognitive load was a mere ten seconds per package, you'd spend a whole week on something as big as Debian.

Packaging is not the only area where "diversity" ends up blocking progress. Source archives and packaging their debian/ subdirectories are another good example. Why do I still need to upload some Upstream tar archive plus a separately-packaged debian/ subdirectory with a debian/patches atrocity, when a git location plus commit ID would take up a whole load less bandwidthß

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 7, 2019 17:33 UTC (Fri) by rweikusat2 (subscriber, #117920) [Link] (3 responses)

You may disagree with something but that's certainly not related to what I was writing about (namely, working with Debian packages doesn't become significantly more difficult because there's no enforced, standard auxiliary toolset for building one).

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 7, 2019 18:29 UTC (Fri) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (2 responses)

Working with one or ten Debian package? no. Working with one or ten thousand? definitely.

It's fairly easy to automatically determine which build steps are "special" in a package if that package uses dh. Anything else? not so much.

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 7, 2019 21:05 UTC (Fri) by rweikusat2 (subscriber, #117920) [Link] (1 responses)

Assuming that building a package takes 10s (unrealistic), someone doing nothing but "building packages" 24x7 would need more than a day to build "10,000 packages". A project of this size would necessarily need to be handled by a fairly large group of people. Also, there aren't "10,000" different toolchains for package building, the number is probably less than 10.

OTOH, feel free to believe whatever you want. I have a forked package I need to work on ...

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 7, 2019 21:40 UTC (Fri) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Assuming that building a package takes 10s (unrealistic), someone doing nothing but "building packages" 24x7 would need more than a day to build "10,000 packages".

Um, that's what automated build farms are for...?

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 10, 2019 19:52 UTC (Mon) by derobert (subscriber, #89569) [Link]

You're looking for dgit, which although it doesn't save the bandwidth (since the original + delta upload is still done), does save you from having to worry about it. Also, conceivably, if enough of Debian switches to it, getting rid of source packages (replacing them with git repositories) becomes possible.

There was also discussion about this recently on debian-devel, as Ian Jackson is trying to make sure it works with all git workflows, with the eventual goal of everyone using it.

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 7, 2019 3:58 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

> there's even a procedure for that called NMU (non-maintainer upload), usually employed for fixes which are considered urgent, IOW, security issues, these being done by a dedicated team of people.

Yep, you said it yourself. NMU is limited to urgent things and a small number of people. Fedora proven packagers are more in number and routinely make non urgent changes. Small targeted fixes are welcome and encouraged.

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fesco/Provenpackager...

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Who_is_allowed_to_modify_w...

It is a huge difference in scope and general culture

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 7, 2019 14:52 UTC (Fri) by rweikusat2 (subscriber, #117920) [Link] (1 responses)

The original statement was about something being impossible. It's demonstrably not.

Seeking consensus on dh

Posted Jun 7, 2019 15:17 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> The original statement was about something being impossible. It's demonstrably not.

Fair but it's also demonstrably not as easy or common as in Fedora