Dealing with weird upstream sources

["David Z. Maze" <dmaze@mit.edu>]

I'm trying to build a (mostly local) package of MIT Kerberos 5.  The
problem is, the "upstream source" is more than a little weird.  One
downloads an (uncompressed) tar file.  That tar file contains three
gzipped tarballs, and one needs to unpack all three to get the actual
source tree.

But that's not all: having done that, one gets a directory with a
README file, a doc subdirectory, and a src subdirectory.  That's it.
If one goes into the src subdirectory, there's a pretty normal-looking
source tree there (ignoring, of course, the little detail that the
Kerberos people don't seem to believe in depending on external
packages, so things like autoconf are included in the package).

What's the best way to deal with this?  My first guess is to use the
upstream tar file as "upstream source", include a diff in the Debian
diffs, and have debian/rules unpack the three source tarballs and
patch it.  This also seems like a pain, both to build and to work on.
I could also turn the three sub-tarballs into one big
not-quite-pristine source tarball, which seems much easier to deal
with though not quite "correct".  Any hints?

-- 
David Maze             dmaze@mit.edu          http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting.  Politicking should be illegal."
	-- Abra Mitchell