Re: Debian for Linux/{non-i386} / source packaging
Michael Alan Dorman <mdorman@lot49.med.miami.edu> said:
> I'll go further and say that I think that any approach that does not
> include as one of its goals the ability to work with totally virgin source
> archives is a total waste of time because it doesn't buy us enough to
^^^^^^^^
> justify the work.
>
> So if we start from the assumption that we will have a separate, totally
> unmodified source .tar.gz, that means we will have at a minimum two files.
If we're starting with the assumption that we're working with the actual
upstream source archives, as opposed to a source archive possibly created
by having the upstream archive unpacked and repacked without modification,
we're not justified in asssuming that we have a .tar.gz upstream archive
to work with. At least one, perhaps several, of my packages come as .zip
files from upstream. At one time, I had (and may still have) packages
which came packaged from upstream as sharfiles.
> So, what can we have that other file to be?
If we concede that the upstream sources might be unpacked and then
repacked without modification, it's not a big step to say that they're
not repacked into a vanilla .tar.gz file but instead into some
other format -- probably a .<whatever> archive which contains the
upstream sources as a .tar.gz file, debianizing diffs as a .diff.gz
file, and probably some other items as well. So, we don't have
to have an "other" file.
> I would propose that it be a script (humanly readable, though it doesn't
> have to be the prettiest thing around) that knows how to create a
> directory, unpack the virgin sources into that directory, and then patch
> the sources from patches included in its body.
This script might be in the archive instead of the .diff.gz file, or
in addition to it, or might be a new debain tool expected to be already
present on the system, or ...
> Seems to me that this doesn't have to be particularly hard, so I must be
> missing something, right?
It's like driving from my location in the Seattle suburbs to the Space
Needle. It's not difficult, but there's a lot of ways it could be done
and some particular way needs to be chosen.
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