Re: Proposal: New source format (was Re: [Fwd: Re: dpkg question])

[Joey Hess <joey@kite.ml.org>]

Lars Wirzenius:
> They might not understand enough about shell scripts (or Perl, or
> whatever the script is written in) and whatever tools the script uses
> to make an informed decision of whether the script is safe. With the
> current scheme, they only have to trust gzip, tar, patch, and chmod,

And all of debian/rules. And debmake or anoy other programs called by it. 
They are planning on building this package, right?

> if they unpack it manually. Also, with the current scheme it is
> _simple_ to unpack it manually, and the method is always the same.
> 
> You might want to unpack a source package for other reasons than
> to build it -- e.g., I've sometimes searched for documentation. A
> non-programmer might want to do this so that they can typeset the
> documentation in LaTeX, instead of printing out the LaTeX2HTML'd
> version.

I don't see how this applies. We make a tool to run the script and unpack
the package. No harder than it is now.

-- 
See shy Jo.


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