On Thu, Apr 30, 1998 at 01:57:28PM -0400, Dale Scheetz wrote: > I agree with Ian. The .deb file format is expressly for the distribution > of configured executables (binaries for short). Using this format for > source distribution is simply asking for trouble. > > Maybe we need a tarball that contains .dsc, .changes, .diff, and > .orig.tar.gz all rolled up in one .src file, known to all the necessary > programs, but to me this isn't necessary. You know, for awhile I was using pine 3.96L-2. It was in hamm and it worked. Then hamm was frozen and it went away. A lot of people thought then that there was no more pine in Debian---you watched the resulting thread, everybody here did. Now, by this time I knew about the source for pine 3.96L-7. I knew about it because I was getting the source to build in maildir support for pine 3.96-2, but I found later that it was already added. I would NEVER have known there was a source package if I didn't need to build it. And I would NEVER found qmail without qmail-src. Until such time as apt will handle .dsc files and source packages, the .deb packages are the closest thing we have to readily accessable distribution. Do you always go picking through source dirs looking for new programs? I don't. And I'm sure a lot of other people don't either. At least for now, packages like pine-src and qmail-src are a GOOD thing. > For almost two years now we have distributed source packages as a > collection of checksum authenticated files with a pgp signed changes file > containing them. These four files: .dsc, .changes, .diff, and .orig.tar.gz > comprise the Debian Source Format, as described in the significant > documentation. > > We do it this way for both DFSG Free as well as for contrib and non-free > software, so why make an exeption in this case? Because these are different circumstances. I would consider removing the qmail-src package---something done as a service to those who want to sue qmail but would otherwise go and get the tarball and never know it could be installed RIGHT. > Retrieval of source from archives is usually done "by hand" but any such > bulk retrieval should be easy to manage with a script. I take the lack of > a script to indicate the current relative lack of need. Anyone is welcome > to prove me wrong by writing such a script ;-) Why would anyone write the script, someone else was kind enough to put it in a .deb so there was no need. A .deb that shows up in dselect and Packages files.
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