On Tue, Jun 04, 2002 at 12:38:53AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote: > On Mon, Jun 03, 2002 at 08:26:01PM +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote: > > On Mon, 2002-06-03 at 20:28, Till Gerken wrote: > > > Yeah, so how about having the same as with MPlayer? It does have a > > > working debian directory, so everybody who is interested, can do > > > dpkg-buildpackage and is fine. > > > > I'd really love to have this in *all* source trees, since it would make > > things much easier for we users that need to use CVS software all the > > time, and can't wait for packages to be made. > > > > So, my question is, is there any reason why all the debian/ dirs are not > > sent upstream for inclusion in CVS? As a maintainer, I would gratefully > > accept any patch for doing so to the modules I maintain. > > I find it very awkward to do this when maintaining Debian packages. In > particular, dpkg-source doesn't allow removing files in the Debian diff > at the moment. Even one of the packages for which I'm both upstream and > Debian maintainer has the debian/ directory maintained separately, > because I find it better to keep the two roles distinct. I disagree. When I was upstream-only, I included the debian directory from the debian package, main reason was that the debian maintainer did not want to package my newest version because of possible instabilities. With the debian directory, I could build my own package and tell my users that they could easily build their package by just calling dpkg-buildpackage. Everyone was happy. Now I have adopted my package, and I keep the debian directory in the tarball. Every time I release a new version I also create a new debian package. If it happens that I only change the debian related stuff I include a diff.gz. It also happened that I wanted to remove a file (debian/postrm). I wasn't important, if it had been I could have removed it in debian/rules. > Aside from that, the Debian diff conventionally contains the debian/ > directory, and I find the separation here useful. A couple of times I've > come across a package that has its debian/ directory kept in CVS but has > got slightly out of sync due to a change of maintainer, and the result > is typically a total mess. Keeping the whole thing separate means that > it has more of a tendency to stay vaguely sane. The upstream maintainer should probably care about the debian package. Like me ;-) Mermgfurt, Oliver
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