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Re: native packages



>   It seems to me that the criteria should be that if any changes at all,
>   even including just adding entries to a changelog file or setting the
>   Maintainer field in a control file, are required from the pristine
>   extracted upstream source, then a .diff.gz must be there; otherwise, a
>   .diff.gz must not be there.

Replying to my own post, the situation that Ted Ts'o mentioned where
diff can't represent the changes demonstrates that my statement does
have some exceptions.

I guess all I'm saying is that I don't see "useful outside of Debian"
as relevant to whether the package is native.  I only see "changes
required from upstream version" as relevant.

Although it is true that one cannot encapsulate changes to binary
files in the diff directly, one could handle changes to binary files
in a dpatch-style way: create ASCII representations of xdelta files
that are decoded and applied in debian/rules.  I'm sure the situation
of doing stuff like adding icons must not be that uncommon in debian
packages, so people must have plenty of solutions to this problem.
Maybe tricks like this would be worth doing in some cases and not in
others.  Even this doesn't work if you have to completely exclude some
portion of the upstream source because it can't be redistributed,
though.  But I fear that I'm rambling and drifting off topic, so I'll
stop. :-)

-- 
Jay Berkenbilt <ejb@ql.org>
http://www.ql.org/q/



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