lintian, source format 3.0 and blog comments

Regarding my previous post on source format 3.0, I think it came across that I was blaming lintian entirely which would be unfair.

(As a side-note, a bug in serendipity XMLRPC resulting in all entries having comments disabled has led to a welcome effect of spreading the discussion more widely than a series of comments on my own site could have achieved. I'm happy with this state of affairs, so it you want to comment, either contact me by private email or put your comments on your own blog. I won't be enabling comments any time soon.)

The extended information behind the lintian warning is one thing (I've explained my position on that to Russ privately) - my main objection is to how such a warning was pushed into lintian and the entire use 3.0 or be damned approach that seems to be being adopted.

IMHO, source format 3.0 is not good enough to be the standard dpkg source format for a simple reason: It offers nothing to well maintained packages. Not all packages need NMU's - ever. Not all packages have patches - ever. Native packages and packages with the Debian maintainer upstream gain nothing from 3.0, as far as I can see.

I have 67 source packages - after much very careful consideration, I have found that a handful of those (less than 10) actually benefit from 3.0 and the rest are all unaffected. None of the packages that I will keep on 1.0 have ever had an NMU since I've been maintainer, most are either native or entirely under my sole upstream control. I will decide whether Debian gets a .tar.gz or a .tar.bz2 and although I generally offer both for download where I can, I see no reason to adopt .tar.bz2 as my default for Debian packaging.

Adding a redundant directory and file is obnoxious. I fail to see why debian/source-format would not have been perfectly suitable. Nevertheless, I will do what is necessary to avoid 3.0 until there is a compelling technical reason to adopt it.

The imperative for those in favour of 3.0 is to convince me that there is a reason TO change, not to make it difficult for me NOT to change. I do not need any reason to avoid 3.0 other than I do not have a good enough reason to move from 1.0. Making developers feel like luddites or incompetent merely because the proponents of 3.0 have failed to convince others to move to 3.0 is just insulting. You want me to use 3.0? Explain why I should bother - the current "reasons" on the Wiki page are simply not good enough and any rehash of those will be ignored. Come up with something new or respect my decision and let me get on with more important stuff.