Re: watch-1.0-2
Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk> said, regarding package diffs:
> Bill Mitchell writes ("Re: watch-1.0-2"):
> > Gunzip will choke on a zero-length compressed file, so I've been
> > gzipping a file which contains a single newline to provide a .diff.gz
> > file in this situation (legally gzipped, and legally empty of diffs).
>
> Wibble.
What's a wibble?
> > Could whoever owns the packaging guidelines please clarify this?
> > Is the .diff.gz file required, even if not strictly needed?
>
> No, it's not required (as you could tell from the dpkg release
> announcements, for example).
>
> > Personally, I'd consider this a reasonable requirement, since lack of
> > diffs tends to break things (e.g., Ian Jackson's recent proposal for a
> > new packaging format).
>
> No, it doesn't break that either. *sigh*
Sigh....
Ian's proposal (a good one, I thought) was:
+ I propose that the source package for `foo', version 1.2 revision 5,
+ would be a gzipped tarfile with the following structure:
+
+ foo-1.2-5.debian-diff
+ foo-1.2.orig/foo.c
+ /foo.h
+ &c
Unless it's absolutely clear that something is optional, code will be
written which expects it to be present and fails if it's not found.
That's why I've been uploading legal-but-empty compressed diffs.
However, if they're optional, I'll omit that in future.
> > If diffs are optional, I'll modify dchanges(1) to consider them optional.
>
> Please do so.
OK.
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