Hi,

I've seen you as the last person commiting to netcat-openbsd
for Debian in 2012[2].

I have written a package definition for netcat-openbsd for Guix.

At Guix we don't want to maintain forks through in-tree patchsets
and avoid it whenever possible. Patches are usually for fixing
CVEs and fixing severe build problems specific to guix.

Now this is a problem which is reflected in the thread at [0]
(discussing the netcat-openbsd package).

Resulting from the discussion I have questions for you:

1. I'd like to know if Debian could merge the specific changes
   applied to the OpenBSD package, available in the patches set,
   into the OpenBSD GNU-linux port.
   If this is not possible, could you give us the reason for it?
   My impression is that at least Gentoo, Gentoo deriviates and
   based systems, Archlinux, and Debian use the orig-source +
   the patches tarball.

2. Did you try to merge more generic changes back to OpenBSD?

   From what I've seen so far, those are bug fixes and a minority
   of feature fixes.

3. There's an initial statement in the README but as many of those
   are non-trivial patches, could you try and give an explanation
   on why they are needed,
   if they can't get merged into the Debian orig-source?


Third option I thought of, could Debian provide a tarball of
the orig-source with the patches applied, so there's no need
to conflict with systems currently pulling one or both of the
currently existing tarball.

We can apply all the patches in a way mentioned here [1], but
because we collectively maintain all the packages/source instead
of `n' specific packages per `n' specific developer(s) it would
be good in case Debian can't merge the changes to be able to
point to a reason.
For this, I ask for your permission to quote parts you give me
permission to use for, should for any reason this email
discussion not end up completely CC'ed on guix-devel.

[0]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-06/msg00843.html
[1]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2016-06/msg00909.html
[2]: http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/netcat-openbsd.git/commit/debian?id=db2b1d9a8d4644ef892f47d84606ee96598d23fb


thanks,
--
♥Ⓐ  ng0
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