[Pkg-nginx-maintainers] [Resend] [RFC] nginx packaging refactor

[M. Zhou]

Hi,

I quickly went through your changes. I think the motivation behind the series
of changes makes full sense in terms of improving packaging quality.
But we need to hear the nginx maintainers' opinion before making the next step.

And I saw your RFS request on debian-mentors at l.d.o ...
You may want to go through the standard ITS process as per devref:
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/pkgs.en.html#package-salvaging
instead of directly submit an RFS.

Note, ITS works even if the original maintainers are too busy to respond your RFC.
My suggestion is to separately submit an ITS bug, and append the ITS bug to
your RFS request as additional info, and tag the RFS as moreinfo:

To: <the-rfs-bug-address>
Mail-Body:
Control: tags -1 +moreinfo

FYI, this RFS is pending for approval through RFC (<URL>)/ITS (<URL>)

The changes are significant. So please expect a long review period.
Thank you for the work! Let's look forward to the maintainer's response.


On Sun, 2022-04-10 at 15:02 +0800, Miao Wang wrote:
> Dear nginx maintainers,
> 
> I'm a user of Debian nginx packages. I'm writing to suggest a possible way to 
> improve the packaging of nginx in Debian.
> 
> Currently, the nginx package is shipping several useful third-party modules. 
> However, the modules are embed into the debian/modules directory and compiled
> along with the nginx binary, which has three shortcomings: 1. the version number
> of third party modules is forced to be the same with the nginx binary, although
> they have their own version numbers, and thus it is not convenient to track
> their versions. 2. An simple upgrade to any of the modules and nginx itself
> would trigger a total rebuild of the entire package, and resulting the users to
> upgrade all the packages. 3. Embedding too much code in debian/ directory does
> not look good and is somewhat o kind of abuse.
> 
> The root cause of the problems is that nginx lacks the native ability to compile
> out-of-tree modules separately. However, using all the headers and the configure
> scripts in the auto/ directory, out-of-tree modules can be successfully
> compiled.
> 
> Utilizing this mechanism, I created a new package called nginx-dev, containing
> all the headers and scripts needed to compile a nginx module, removed all the
> 3rd-party modules in the nginx package, and put them in separate packages. 
> Additionally, I created debhelper scripts to help the packaging of nginx
> modules and improved the dn_nginx script.
> 
> The module packages have their own versions now and for those the version of
> which is smaller than the current nginx, I increased the epoch. All the modules
> depends on an exact upstream version, but not a certian debian revision, because
> the signature in a module contains the version number and we can assure that
> we won't introduce abi changes to nginx during revisioning. Thus, patching nginx
> won't affect the modules and the users can upgrade only the main nginx packages.
> 
> I put the above work at https://salsa.debian.org/shankerwangmiao/nginx in the
> feat-remove-mods branch, and modules also at shankerwangmiao/ngx-* in the
> deb/<ver> branch. I also included the njs module, which I'd like it to be an
> example for a complex module.
> 
> It would be grateful if you have any comments on my work.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Miao Wang