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[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 12:44:57PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>         Arguably, we should all use debhelper and use quilt+subversion,
>  to make it easier for more people to follow the package. And, really,
>  we should all be using rpm or tar.gz. (More people use subversion than
>  do understand git).

Eh :)

>         At some point we draw a line at popularity, and making things
>  easier for everyone else part from the ones currently doing the work).
>  I have a line where my productivity and motivation are sufficiently
>  negatively impacted that changing to goals to make things easy for
>  (potential) contributors at the expense of my workflow results in a
>  regression.

It looks to me you are implicitly assuming that there is an exclusive
choice between patch series and Vcs. If that were true your argument
would stand, but it is not true, and TopGit is there exactly to show
that (if it is up to the task).

The fact is that among Debian developers and maintainers not everyone
is familiar with all Vcs we have, but we do want people to be able to
work on whatever package to help out with bug fixing (and possibly
with NMU). The idea of providing *also* a patch series is to diminish
barrier in contributing to a package.

Of course that should not be done augmenting the burden on top of the
usual maintainer and that, again, is something that TopGit should show
to be considered the right™ tool.

Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
I'm still an SGML person,this newfangled /\ All one has to do is hit the
XML stuff is so ... simplistic  -- Manoj \/ right keys at the right time
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