Re: Bits from the dpkg maintainer
On Sun, 12 Jun 2005 21:05:56 +0100, Scott James Remnant wrote:
[...]
>
> * The "Debian Diff" may be replaced by the "Debian Tar":
> Instead of placing your changes and Debian directory as a patch against
> the upstream tarball in a diff.gz, you may instead ship the Debian
> directory as a debian.tar.gz. This is unpacked into the debian
> sub-directory of the source.
>
This is beautiful. I can't count the number of times I've looked at a
random package that has multiple fixes and enhancement all in the diff.gz,
with no way of knowing what bugs in the BTS they fix, which hunks are are
logically separate, etc. Even worse are the packages which include broken
out patches in the debian directory which are out of date or incomplete,
and no longer match what's in the diff.gz. It's analogous to programs
which have no documentation, incomplete documentation, or worse yet,
completely incorrect documentation.
I'm sure people will still find ways to make other DDs lives difficult in
this manner (everything being in one big patch, including fixes in the
orig tarball, or something equally as stupid), but this seems like
this will go a long way to encourages people to separate out
upstream enhancement/fixes.
As an added bonus, this is how I typically do development (which
is similar to how HCT does stuff under the hood, from what I've seen), so
that debian-directory-specific baz/git/$RCS branch will now map
directly to a tarball, and individual patches in debian/patches will map
to their respective branches.
/me wipes a tear of joy from his eye
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