Bug#904962: antlr4: non-standard tarball repacking; please use copyright/Files-Excluded; redundant "debian/orig-tar.sh"

[Dmitry Smirnov]

Control: tag -1 patch

On Monday, 30 July 2018 4:46:50 PM AEST Emmanuel Bourg wrote:

> > "debian/orig-tar.sh" is redundant as all it does can be done by "uscan".
> 
> It can be done with uscan but not as conveniently. debian/orig-tar.sh
> keeps only the Java runtime with a simple "rm -Rfv !(Java)" call. To get
> the equivalent behavior with uscan we would have to list all the
> runtimes excluded, which is more tedious to maintain.

Perhaps not as tedious as you might think - the attached patch reproduces 
behavior of custom repack script in less lines, that are straightforward to 
maintain and far more common (if not universal) in Debian ecosystem.

Using standard approach to repacking is good and the additional advantage is 
explicit visibility of what is being thrown away - for example it is good to 
know that original tarball contains pre-built .JAR file...

IMHO on this instance repack is so straightforward that custom script is 
difficult to justify...


> The reason is the Java Team doesn't want to maintain the ANTLR runtime
> for other languages than Java. We tried that with ANTLR 2.x and that was
> too difficult to manage properly. We now prefer splitting the package by
> language, each maintained by skilled dedicated developers and with it's
> own independent update schedule. There are the libantlr3c and
> python3-antlr3 packages for example.

I see... But isn't the down side of this approach is necessary coordination 
of uploads of multiple source packages? Suppose we'll introduce libantlr4-dev 
with C++ support which is not built from the same source package as "antlr4" 
- then compiler and headers would be provided by different binary packages 
produced by different source packages. Inevitably that will create mismatch 
situations and odd bugs that would be impossible to have if support for 
various languages were to be built from single source, as intended by 
upstream...

-- 
Cheers,
 Dmitry Smirnov.

---

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the
results.
        -- Winston Churchill
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