Re: bogus lintian warning
On Fri, 30 Sep 2005, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
> Laszlo Boszormenyi <gcs@lsc.hu> writes:
> >> When they do, it is a violation of Debian standards to remove it from
> >> the orig.tar.gz file. So there is no question of doing that.
>
> > Where do you read that? May be true, but can't remember any place ATM.
>
> What do you think "orig" means in "orig.tar.gz"? We make a necessary
It is a strong hint that one should muck as little as possible with the
.orig* tarballs. Anyway, it is pretty much the current best practice
that:
0. You don't add OR change anything to .orig.tar.gz other than tarball
metadata (except filenames -- don't touch those!).
1. You are free to fix permission and other utter breakages of the kind
(devices and other special inodes, relative paths, etc) which for some
reason cannot be fixed by debian/rules. Nowadays I doubt you can get
permission problems that debian/rules can't fix because dpkg-source
will fix the absolute minimum to get debian/rules to work for you, but
still...
2. You are free to remove stuff for technical or DFSG-compliance reasons.
BUT you are to document any and ALL .orig changes in debian/copyright.
> >> If you remove the CVS files from your unpacked build directory, that's
> >> well and good, but dpkg-source refuses to honor this, printing helpful
> >> messages like
> >> dpkg-source: warning: ignoring deletion of directory stylesheet/CVS
>
> > That's correct. You should remove it from .orig.tar.gz .
>
> Hogwash. It should not be removed at all.
It *can* be removed, but there is little reason to. In fact, unless a
developer is using an utterly braindamaged VC-enabled Debian packaging
toolset, he will be notified by the toolset of the potential problems and he
will be able to remove the CVS/svn/whatever crap before it hoses his VC
system.
> Next will you be saying that other bugs in upstream packaging should
> be marked by lintian?
IF they are going to cause major blowups on someone else, yes. But I can't
think of any.
And lintian does pester about outdated config.sub/guess, etc. These
warnings are useful from time to time.
> It does make sense to warn against Debian developers who have *added*
> a CVS directory not present in the upstream source, but that's a
> different matter.
Or those who screw up and add it to a non-orig .orig.tar.gz (and by that I
do NOT mean a modified upstream one, I mean a re-generated tarball during
build because someone screwed up).
99.9% of the time, one just ignores these lintian warnings as one knows it
comes from the upstream tarball.
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
Reply to: