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

[Sven Mueller]

Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote on 02/08/2005 01:21:
> 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.

I may have confused what happened where. However another reason not to
simply remove modified files is to be able to use
dpkg-buildpackage -b -tc
twice from within the same unpacked sources, which makes developing a
lot easier in my opinion. And though this is not mandated by policy,
recent discussions on #debian-mentors (and IIRC on debian-mentors at l.d.o)
lead to the same conclusion: A source package should be left in a
buildable state after "debian/rules clean". Simply removing modified
files defeats this under many circumstances.

>>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 see two options:
1) add a target create-tarball (or however it was called) to fetch the
   newest upstream tarball and repack it as we want it.
2) clean up and modify the upstream tarball contents during build,
   reverting changes to non-auto-generated files in "debian/rules
   clean".

> 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.

:-) I got the same impression with various (but certainly not all)
upstream tarballs I saw.

>>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)...

We can ignore the extra files. We should backup old crap, replace it
with newer versions and restore the old crap during debian/rules clean.
IMHO that is.

> 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.

True. That's why I want to get back to the pristine upstream tarball.
It was a mistake I made with the very first cyrus22 package I created
that I cleaned it up. I should have done that at build time, not by
"shipping" a modified upstream tarball, but I didn't.

cu,
sven
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