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Re: netcat-openbsd implementations
From: |
Aron Xu |
Subject: |
Re: netcat-openbsd implementations |
Date: |
Sun, 3 Jul 2016 17:52:23 +0800 |
Hi,
See comment below,
On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 8:13 PM, <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
This is long overdue - my intention was to keep netcat-openbsd to
track the development of the openbsd one, but it appears not happened
that way.
> 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.
>
Some of them was sent, but getting few responses.
> 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?
>
I don't treat this netcat-openbsd a full fork even if it's targeting
an older revision at the moment. Also, maintaining patches are very
easy using the git-buildpackage[1] tools for Debian packages.
[1]https://wiki.debian.org/PackagingWithGit
>
> 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.
>
I think it is hardly possible to provide another tarball because
there's no way of doing that with current Debian infrastructure. But
you can apply those patches easily using quilt[2]. In Debian, patches
are applied automatically when extracting the source package using
dpkg-source.
[2]https://wiki.debian.org/UsingQuilt
> 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.
>
No problem.
> [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,
> --
Best,
Aron
- Re: netcat-openbsd implementations,
Aron Xu <=