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by da39a3ee
1759 days ago
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I did mean to reply to your comment, but sorry if I've conflated packaging and application development. It was this sentence that confused me most: > in about 2007 very few Debian packages had their packaging in any sort of standard version control tool (CVS, SVN, etc.) You'd get the sources via apt-get source, and then if you wanted to contribute, you could send in a patch by email to the bug tracker and the maintainer would incorporate it. Here I think you're using "contribute" to refer to contributing to the application codebase, not the packaging codebase. But why would contributing to the application codebase have anything to do with Debian technology such as apt-get source and a debian bug tracker, and why would the maintainer pick up patches from such places? Surely, to contribute to the application you go to the application homepage (often Github nowadays) and open a PR? |
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If anyone other than the package's maintainer / member of the maintaining team (whether a fellow Debian developer, an upstream author/contributor, or a user) has a contribution to make to the Debian package, they should contact the Debian maintainer. In 2007, for almost every package, the only way to do that would be to send the maintainer a patch file, generally through the Debian bug tracking system. (Nowadays, the majority of Debian packaging repos are on https://salsa.debian.org, a GitLab instance, and you can usually open a merge request there and maintainers will notice and accept them.)
The Debian packaging repo consists of, effectively, a build recipe and possibly pre/post install/remove scripts to run on the end user's system. (In practice there are common tools to do the build and to generate those scripts, so you'll find a lot of files to influence the behavior of such tools.) It can also consist of extra changes added by Debian, such as missing manpages or translations, or even patches to the code.
If you have a change to make to a piece of software packaged in Debian, but it's unsuitable for the upstream repo, you can send it to the Debian maintainer and ask them to include it in the packaging repo.
(It also used to be a vague norm that you would always contact the Debian maintainer, who would forward contributions onto upstream if suitable. It's questionable whether that was the right model, and it's certainly not the norm today.)