Re: Decision on leaving upstream tar files untouched?

[bruce@pixar.com (Bruce Perens)]

From: "Brian C. White" <bcwhite@verisim.com>
>  Of course, since the upstream names
>   are not consistant, you can unpack "package_1.0" and get "package1.0/",
>   which is annoying but the lesser of two evils, in my opinion.

You don't have to get that. Dpkg-source could use my tar extractor function
to catch and fix that sort of problem. This would not help people who don't
use dpkg-source.

> Now is a very wrong time for this change.

Agreed.
We should be auditioning the new dpkg-source and the new policy chapter
in some experimental directory so that it is ready when we need it.

I would like to see dpkg-source take an argument list like this:

	dpkg-source -b a.tar.gz b.tar.gz c.diff.gz package-name-a.b.c.debian/

This would create a directory under /var/tmp and extract a.tar.gz and
b.tar.gz and apply c.diff.gz in that directory. It would then diff the
result with the files in package-name-a.b.c.debian/, and generate
another diff.gz from that. It would then build a .dsc file for all of
the .tar.gz and .diff.gz files.

This would allow us to deal with packages like smartlist that are built
of two upstream source.tar.gz files and possibly have an upstream diff.gz
as well.

	Thanks

	Bruce
--
Bruce Perens K6BP   Bruce@Pixar.com   510-215-3502
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