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On 2025-07-13 at 09:03, Ilya Orlov wrote:

Hi everyone!

Upstream gamescope[1] have several embedded copies which current
packaging changes for system libraries (except reshade patch[2]).
But after looking at upstream git commits I believe upstream fully
intends to use these dependencies in an embedded way.

<snip reasonable- and persuasive-seeming details>

Debian policy[9] states:

Debian packages should not make use of these convenience copies
unless the included package is explicitly intended to be used in
this way.

I believe that upstream makes it very clear that it's their
intention.

The way I parse that statement in Policy is that the convenience copies
should not be used unless *the code being included* is explicitly
intended *by **its** upstream* to be used via embedding it. The
intentions of the upstream who are *doing* the embedding would not seem relevant.

There might still be reason to accept doing it in this case - that's
outside of my scope to be able to assess - but I would be surprised to
learn that it was within the intention of this part of Policy.

--
The Wanderer

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw


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On Sun, Jul 13, 2025 at 06:03:56PM +0500, Ilya Orlov wrote:

And if you think it's a good idea I would appreciate some directions
on what is the best way to embed git submodules and meson subprojects
in the source package.

As of devscripts 2.25.11 uscan has support for git submodules - Thanks hmc!

https://salsa.debian.org/debian/devscripts/-/merge_requests/480

This will give you a single orig tarball made up of a concatenation of git-archive(1) exports of the individual git trees.

Here's an example from one of my packages where I needed this:

https://salsa.debian.org/electronics-team/nextpnr/-/blob/master/debian/watch

Pretty simple.

--Daniel

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On Sun, Jul 13, 2025 at 09:28:31AM -0400, The Wanderer wrote:

On 2025-07-13 at 09:03, Ilya Orlov wrote:

Debian policy[9] states:

Debian packages should not make use of these convenience copies
unless the included package is explicitly intended to be used in
this way.

I believe that upstream makes it very clear that it's their
intention.

The way I parse that statement in Policy is that the convenience copies >should not be used unless *the code being included* is explicitly
intended *by **its** upstream* to be used via embedding it. The
intentions of the upstream who are *doing* the embedding would not seem >relevant.

Yes, I was involved in drafting that policy language and the way you
describe it is what we intended. Otherwise the whole clause would have
been a no-op in practice.

--
Colin Watson (he/him) [[email protected]]

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On Mon, Jul 14, 2025 at 10:46:35AM +0500, Ilya Orlov wrote:

Ah, I see. So with this policy it would be ok to embed:
wlroots and reshade - because it's forks made specifically to be used
in gamescope submodules.

No, only if the original wlroots and reshade projects were ones that
were intended to be used via vendoring/embedding.

Again, if the policy clause were simply about the intent of a fork of
some original library, it would be almost completely ineffective,
because when people fork libraries and copy them into their projects
they generally intend to do so; that doesn't mean that Debian wants to
support that.

The point of that policy exception was to avoid outlawing things like
Gnulib (https://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/), which is specifically
designed from the start to be copied into projects at the source level
(and comes with various tools to make that more maintainable). It's a
very different kind of thing.

Even then, more recently there's been a movement to regenerate Gnulib
files in packages that use it from the gnulib package in Debian.

vkroots - because the creator of a project intends it to be used via >embedding (but it's already packaged with specific commit needed by >gamescope, so it's fine for now)

I'm not quite sure from looking at https://github.com/misyltoad/vkroots,
but that may be OK. If it's easy to use the packaged version, that's
better.

--
Colin Watson (he/him) [[email protected]]

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