Intent to commit craziness - source package unpacking

[Guillem Jover]

Hi!

On Mon, 2016-09-26 at 15:37:19 +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> tl;dr:
> 
>  * dpkg developers, please tell me whether I am making assumptions
>    that are likely to become false.  Particularly, on the behaviour of
>    successive runs of dpkg-source --before-build with successively
>    longer series files.

For format «3.0 (quilt)», that seems fine, to the point I'm fine even
documenting this, which I can probably do for 1.18.11.

For other formats, such as «2.0», I don't think that's true, but I
assume you don't care about that one anyway. But just mentioning
because this behavior is probably format-specific. For «2.0» I
think it could be fixed, and should not be too hard (not sure if it's
worth it though).

> dpkg-source does not currently provide interfaces that look like they
> are intended for what I want to do.  And dgit wants to work with old
> versions of dpkg, so I don't want to block on getting such interfaces
> added (even supposing that a sane interface could be designed, which
> is doubtful).

Even then I'm still interested in a decription of what you'd need
ideally, to take into account when having a pass at cleaning up that
part of the interface. I think you could be interested in a cleaner
Dpkg::Source::* hierarchy, for the mid/long-term?

Perhaps we could start a wiki page listing such items.

> So I intend to do as follows.  (Please hold your nose.)
> 
> * dgit will untar each input tarball (other than the Debian tarball).
> 
>   This will be done by scanning the .dsc for things whose names look
>   like (compressed) tarballs, and using the interfaces provided by
>   Dpkg::Compression to get at the tarball.

Hmm, Dpkg::Source::Archive is currently private, but I might have a
look at making it public if that would be helpful here.

> * As currently, dgit will take steps so that none of the git trees
>   discussed above contain a .pc directory.

As long as the directory does not disappear from the working tree,
that should work.

> This has the following properties:

> * dgit now depends on dpkg-source --before-build idempotently applying
>   patches as they successively appear on debian/patches/series.

Again, that seems fine.

Thanks,
Guillem