Evaluation of bundling .buildinfo in .deb proposal

Guillem Jover guillem at debian.org
Mon Aug 31 14:03:55 BST 2020


Hi!

On Mon, 2020-08-31 at 12:39:07 +0000, Holger Levsen wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 12:02:03PM -0000, Chris Lamb wrote:
> > (As an obiter dictum, are we sure it was Holger who was proposing this
> > idea in the talk, rather than mentioning it? I think he has previously
> > echoed my view on the "no special tools" principle, hence this minor
> > remark. Am willing to be corrected either way.)
> 
> yes, it was me who proposed it (watch my dc20 talk! :) and who still
> thinks it's a good idea. sadly I didn't have the time to start the
> discussion in a bug (I only came to this conclusion the day before the
> talk, though I have thought about this for the last 5 years) and I 
> probably still won't have the time until next week. (*)
> 
> I'd appreciate we'd use a bug for discussing this, so whatever the outcome
> will be, we'll have a canonical and truely long living url to reference the
> discussion.

As I hinted (but should probably have been more clear, sorry about
that) on our private mail exchange, a bug report seemed premature to
me, given that it's really not clear (to me at least) this is the way
to go. I tend to find bug reports not a very good medium for broad
design work TBH, and they end up not being very visible once they are
closed, so need to be referenced from other places, such as a wiki. :)

As a summary of a concluded spec to be implemented sure, but otherwise
(at least for dpkg) they feel more like clutter than anything else. If
you insist on opening a bug, then I'll go along, as closing would seem
inappropriate though, but meh. :D

> also, I will not share my thoughts about Guillem's and Chris' reply
> here (and *now*), before I had the opportunity to put the reasoning
> behind my thoughts in a bug report. And I'd hope my thoughts why are laid
> out clearly in my talk available at

I think the reasoning is clear, but perhaps I didn't capture it
correctly in the wiki page, but the problem I'm seeing is in the
implications of the (current) proposal. As I mention in there perhaps
there are other ways to accomplish a similar thing but I'm not seeing
either how those alternatives could unstuck the current infra
deployment problem TBH.

> 	https://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2020/DebConf20/49-reproducing-bullseye-in-practice.webm
> 
> finally, I'm sorry if I come accross harsh. I feel pressured and misunder-
> stood and that I need to react now. I wish I felt different.

Oh! Hmm I didn't mean this as pressure, I thought you were actually
eager to get this discussed publicly, so I went ahead and published
what I understood the proposal was, which perhaps I've not captured
correctly either. I'm happy to sit on this for whatever time you need,
personally I see no hurry myself. :)

Thanks,
Guillem



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