Re: Bug#1421: hello-1.3

[richard@sfere.elmail.co.uk (Richard Kettlewell)]

Bill Hogan writes:

>   Is there an X such that hello-1.3-4.diff.gz is the `diff' between
>X and `tar zxvf hello-1.3-4.tar.gz'?
>
>   If so, what is it?
>
>   If not, what is hello-1.3-4.diff.gz?

hello-1.3-4.diff.gz is supposed to be the diff between
hello-1.3.tar.gz (the `upstream' source, which is not on the Debian
ftp site) and hello-1.3-4.tar.gz (the Debianized source, which is).

There's a `diff' target in the debian.rules Makefile in
hello-1.3-4.tar.gz which will generate it; from one of my packages it
looks like this:

diff:		clean
	cd .. && \
	(diff -ruN $(package)-$(version).orig $(package)-$(version) \
	 >$(package)-$(version)-$(debian).diff; [ $$? = 1 ]) && \
	gzip -9vf $(package)-$(version)-$(debian).diff

...copied from the hello package, in fact.  (Note the ordering there -
it's the opposite to the form of your first question, which means the
answer is strictly ``no''.)

What may (or may not) be confusing you is that the Debianised source
typically lives in a directory like ``hello-1.3'' - without a revision
number.  This ceases to be confusing if as e.g. for the above diff
target the upstream source lives in ``hello-1.3.orig''.

Anyway, what you are supposed to do is apply the diff to the upstream
source; and this will give you the Debianised source.

If you already have the Debianised source then you can ignore the
diff, unless for some reason you want to get back to the upstream
source from the Debianised source.  It is claimed by some that the
reasons for wanting to do this are so compelling that we should be
distributing the unpatched sources instead of the Debianised ones.

ttfn/rjk