On Wed, 2012-08-29 at 19:41 +0200, Guido Berhoerster wrote:
Making patch tags mandatory would be again very useful since they are easily machine-parseable and could be read and displayed in OBS in order to get a quick overview on the purpose and status of all patches of a particular package. Right now I'm using my own script to generate a HTML patch report for all of my packages. There are way too many packages which have obscure foo.dif patches without any explanation whatsoever neither inline, in the spec or changelog. This makes packages practically only maintainable by the person who created them.
I do agree as well on the PATCH- Tag line (the 'forces patchers to report them upstream' is a very good reason), but also know that there is a lot of resistance against this one (there were a lot of discussions around them). But, actually, it IS already specified as mandatory on the Packaging Guide Lines, so the review team might actually be instructed to take this one serious as well.. The goal of all those attempts is, as you correctly state yourself: have the packages easy (well, easier) transferable and any other willing contributor be able to step up without a too high learning curve (see for example Xorg packages (Stefan, no intention to question your work! It IS great): since it was split in smaller chunks of '1-tarball = 1 package' I have seen several more contributors to those packages; A package that was just scary to be touched before, except the maintainer. Somehow I hope that this also helps Stefan to focus more on 'interesting' parts than running after package updates (which are often for X.* packages after all). SO, yes, for '*old*' packagers, this might be a burden which does impose change for all of us, but ALWAYS think about new contributors. Anything undocumented is likely something 'new contributors' have no chance of picking up in reasonable time, and as a consequence they will not pick it up. Dominique -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+owner@opensuse.org