Re: Bug#466550: Pristine source from upstream VCS repository
Ben Finney <ben@benfinney.id.au> writes:
> On 12-Mar-2009, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> I never use uscan --download; I always download the new upstream source
>> myself using wget or a web browser or FTP client.
> Why is that? Is there some downside to using ‘uscan --download’? I would
> have thought it best to use the automated tool where possible, if for no
> other reason than to make sure the automated process will get the same
> source you're working with.
I just personally have never needed it and never found it particularly
useful or interesting. Getting the right upstream tarball is the least of
the things that I do around packaging new upstream source. I'm often
packaging new upstream test releases or packaging something in advance of
it being available from upstream's web site, I look through the web site
for restructuring or other information that I need to be aware of, etc.
As Manoj says, this is more about personal workflow than really about what
Policy can talk about. I guess that I find the current Policy definition
of get-orig-source rather uninteresting and wouldn't bother to implement
something that exactly follows what's there. I *do* find it useful to
automate the process of stripping an upstream tarball of non-DFSG bits,
and when I first started doing Debian packaging, the examples I looked at
used get-orig-source to do that. So that's what I started doing as well.
I'm open to the idea that this really isn't the best way of handling it
and we should standardize something other than get-orig-source as the way
of stripping an upstream tarball (such as, for instance, a script in the
debian/ directory that you run on the upstream source tarball, however you
obtained it). I would rather not have only textual descriptions of what
to do. It's nice to have it automated and to be able to look at a simple
shell script to see *exactly* what transformations are applied.
But I'm not sure I'd ever personally use a target that downloads the
current upstream source and tries to apply the stripping process that
worked with the last release I packaged, all as one atomic step. It
doesn't fit my workflow. (I of course have no objections to standardizing
a way of doing that for people who have different workflows than mine, or
restoring get-orig-source as the correct way of doing that and changing
all my targets to be something else.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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