Re: Call for testing: Daily snapshot builds of Emacs for Ubuntu

[Julien Danjou <julien@danjou.info>]

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On Mon, May 13 2013, Robert Park wrote:

> What's this then? Is this a debian package dedicated to emacs
> snapshots? I honestly wasn't aware of this branch at all; I'd been
> referring to the packaging for emacs24 that ubuntu imports from
> debian.

It's the Debian package for emacs-snapshot that has been distributed for
years in Debian, and in Ubuntu via Damien Cassou.

> Hmmm, nope. The debian/rules that I've been referring to is 629 lines
> (compared to 166 for mine). So it seems we are talking about different
> things ;-)

I didn't count the comments.

> Admittedly I did come up with that original figure by doing a
> quickndirty 'find|xargs wc -l' and it did include the changelog,
> there's still a lot of cruft that I am rebelling against. Like 800
> lines worth of distropatching just to rip out some GFDL stuff. I find
> that kind of thing quite odious and pride myself on having a packaging
> branch that has no distropatches at all ;-)

I don't think you're talking about the emacs-snapshot package here?
In emacs24 packages, that has to be since GFDL stuff aren't DFSG
compliant. But we don't do this in emacs-snapshot packages, because we
don't really care about this issue.

> One of my major goals was Upstream Purity, so that people testing the
> packages would be having an unadulterated trunk experience, hopefully
> making bug reports more relevant and timely. Both the packaging branch
> that you've linked and the one I've been referring to for emacs24
> contain a huge load of distropatches.

Did you really read the actual patches?
All patches are there to help having working default on a Debian system,
plus a few to indicate which Debian's version of the package it is.

And even if we had patches that would modify or fix upstream, a better
job would be to make sure we don't have to need them anymore.

> Now, I'm not opposed to porting some of the work I've done to improve
> the existing packages, just that on the whole I was a bit overwhelmed
> by the size of the existing packages and wanted to make something
> leaner. I'm quite pleased with what I've achieved and I'm using it
> every day, I uninstalled emacs24 package over a month ago and haven't
> looked back ;-)

No offense, but maybe you should consider that not understanding a whole
actual package isn't necessary a sign that the package is convoluted,
but may be a sign you lack some knowledge to understand everything?

Anyway, I'd be glad you'd help to improve the existing package rather
than building something new and half-baked.

-- 
Julien Danjou
;; Free Software hacker ; freelance consultant
;; http://julien.danjou.info

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