Re: jquery debate with upstream

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

[ Lars just covered some of this in another part of the thread, but as
  I had this drafted already, I'm sending it anyway. ]

On Thu, 2014-03-13 at 14:21:22 +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> On the other hand, the "upstream" tarballs are becoming temporary cruft that
> are not the preferred form for modification because they do not contain the
> typical revision information and comments found in version control systems used
> upstream.  This was not the case when Debian was founded, but as the world
> evolves, we need to evolve.

You keep bringing this up, and it keeps making no sense. Upstream
authors, use $EDITOR (be that vim, gimp, etc) to modify the files,
might use $VCS (be that diff, cvs, git, etc) to track modifications
on those files, and use $PUBLISHER (be that tarball, patch, $VCS, etc)
to distribute the files. And still when talking about the preferred
form of modification, it's all about the _files_ themselves, not any
of the above, what's relevant is if we are dealing with say a foo.S
foo.c or foo.o file, and if one is the source for the other.

Otherwise maintainers might have to use eclipse and bzr, because
that's what upstream prefers, when they might be more comfortable
with emacs and a git-bzr bridge, for example. Not to mention that
part of the upstream project context is in the authors' brains…

You also keep repeating that tarballs are cruft/obsolete and similar
adjectives, which I don't think is a generally held view or opinion,
personally I find it an unfortuntate side effect of the DVCS craze;
they are just well defined snapshots, and allow to bundle in a
“universal” and DVCS tool-independent way the project source, in the
same way the “universal” change tracking interchange format is still
a patch.

Thanks,
Guillem