Intent to commit craziness - source package unpacking

[Ian Jackson]

Guido Günther writes ("Re: Intent to commit craziness - source package unpacking"):
> On Mon, Oct 03, 2016 at 04:15:08PM +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> [..snip..]
> >   Recommends: pristine-tar (>= 0.5)
...> > 
> >     pristine-tar has been declared unmaintainable by its original
> >     author and abandoned.
...
> >     Certainly dgit users do not need pristine-tar.  But our dependency
> >     system does not allow us to honour only direct Recommends and not
> >     transitive ones.
> 
> Looking at git.debian.org I found plenty of users. I did an archive
> import of sid during Debconf and was only ran into 20 pristine-tar
> failures (bugs yet to be filed).

Interesting.

> From the discussions at DC16 we're on our way to make this a hard
> dependency:
> 
>      http://lists.sigxcpu.org/pipermail/git-buildpackage/2016-July/000143.html
> 
> The only thing I can think of (since we will keep support for not using
> pristine-tar nevertheless) is using:
> 
>      Recommends: pristine-tar | dgit

I'm not sure of the logic behind that.  I don't think dgit helps much
with the kind of tasks that pristine-tar helps with.

> >   Recommends: cowbuilder                        <= jessie
> >   Recommends: cowbuilder | pbuilder | sbuild    <= sid
...
> gbp buildpackage has integration with pbuilder/cowbuilder (via
> git-builder) and I know people are using it since its better integrated
> into gbp since you don't need additional and it's documented in the
> manual. The sbuild dependency is there to have people not pull in
> cowbuilder/pbuilder so they can use --git-builder=sbuild.

Ah.

> Not sure what can be done here.

It sounds like it should be left as-is, TBH.

> >   Depends: devscripts
> > 
> >     devscripts is very full of commands with poor namespacing.  It
> >     also has an enormous dependency chain.
> > 
> >     Unfortunately dgit has a dependency on devscripts too.  Maybe we
> >     should work to take the pieces of devscripts that we really need
> >     and put them in something else, or something.
> 
> We're mostly using dch with "gbp dch" and I would also be happy to have
> the dependency chain shortened.

If it were my package, and that was all I depended on devscripts for,
I would drop it entirely.  I think it's fair to expect someone who
uses `gbp dch' to install the package containing dch.  But this is a
matter of taste.

dgit has a much harder dependency because dgit push uses dput.

Ian.

-- 
Ian Jackson <ijackson at chiark.greenend.org.uk>   These opinions are my own.

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