[Pkg-Cyrus-imapd-Debian-devel] .orig.tar.gz orig vs. repacked

[Henrique de Moraes Holschuh]

On Mon, 01 Aug 2005, Sven Mueller wrote:
> The mechanism removed _many_ files which were in the upstream tarball.
> This caused a huge diff because dpkg-buildpackage wanted to include them

That can't happen. Removed files in debian/rules clean NEVER show up in a
.diff, EVER.  Unless someone has broken^Hchanged dpkg, and it now tries to delete
files with patch, which AFAIK it did not do in sarge.

> a) work with a real pristine upstream tarball, or

We work with a pristine .orig, and clean it up before we try to use it.
Working from a clean upstream tree is just too utopian to survive the real
world, unless upstream happens to like Debian unstable for generating
tarballs :-)

I speak that with quite a few years of Debian packaging experience.
Pristine .orig is good.  Pristine trees are far, far more trouble and waste
of resources than what they could ever be worth.

> b) have some small script which creates a cleaned up and repacked
>    orig.tar.gz tarball for us to work with.

Can't debian/rules clean do that for us?  What else do we need?  We can
tolerate the kind of breakage CMU tarballs have, which is quite benign (old
crap and extra files)...

Why do we need to have a cleaned up .orig.tar.gz?  It ends up causing us
more work, since we have to take care of it anyway.

> > I did work, but not much.  The major unstable breakage killed any
> > possibility of doing builds for a while, and my dev machine is back into
> > track for 3 or 4 days only, now :P
> 
> Oh well, murphy's law hit you then? Glad to hear you are back on track
> though.

Yeah, unstable was waaaay too broken to update, and with a new gcc waiting
in that upgrade, I couldn't very well upload things.  Then I had some major
headaches when I got back from Finland, etc.

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh