A little extra value in 3.0 (quilt) format

Wouter still does not like the 3.0 (quilt) packaging format. And as he writes on his blog, I shall answer on mine.

And what if one of the blogs becomes unreachable with time? Aha! That’s one of the weaknesses, Wouter, on yuor closing comment:

I have all my packages stored in git with a proper Vcs-Git: header; if people really want to look at individual patches, they can just use debcheckout, kthxbye.

I am aware this would not be so much of an argument, or so much of a change. But the way I view a shipped package is that it should, by itself, be as a snapshot with its whole, full description. Say that three years from now Apple has scrubbed your brain and you went to work with them. And you decided to pull all of your non-iOS repositories. They have convinced you working for Debian is bad for mankind. So you erase all of your Git repos, including those in Alioth or whatever.

But Debian Wheezy has some of your packages. And three years from now, I decided to be the maintainer.

So, having fully commented and individually marked patches is a sort-of-way to avoid a situation akin to the tentacles of evil.

Now, it’s not that I’m criticizing your workflow. I have sen many ways to manage patches in quite a natural way, and I undestand it might be way easier when dealing with complex packages (FWIW I usually deal with very little complexity). Still, it is an argument.