(Reposted here with additions from my blog, for people who don't read that.) Keeping pristine upstream tarballs around is a pain, especially when working in a team. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to keep them in revision control? Except, it would use far too much disk... Here's a solution. It generates a binary delta between the pristine upstream tarball and a tarball created using files checked out of the repository. The delta should be quite small, and any checkout of the repository that has the same file contents as that used to create the delta can be used to regenerate the pristine tarball. Example (which would presumably be more fun and faster if I used git, but works well enough): joey@kodama:~package/uqm-voice> svn switch svn+ssh://uqm.debian.net/srv/svn/uqm/tags/uqm-voice/upstream_version_0.3 D debian A comm/blackur/black041.ogg U comm/shofixt/shofi040.ogg U comm/starbas/starb182.ogg D comm/slyland/slyla030.ogg U comm/chmmr/chmmr035.ogg U comm/supox/supox031.ogg Updated to revision 223. joey@kodama:~package/uqm-voice> pristine-tar extract ~/uqm-voice.delta ../uqm-voice_0.3.orig.tar.gz A quick svn switch back to trunk and the package is ready for building. The generated tarball is bit-identical to the 19 MB upstream tarball, though you have to gunzip them both to check this, since the gzip compression differs. The 41k uqm-voice.delta file was created earlier as follows; normally this would happen when packaging the new upstream version, and it could be checked into revision control. joey@kodama:~> pristine-tar stash lib/debian/unstable/uqm-voice_0.3.orig.tar.gz uqm-voice.delta I've uploaded pristine-tar to incoming or see svn://svn.debian.org/collab-maint/deb-maint/pristine-tar/trunk I'm hoping that some people will find this useful and support for it will get into svn-buildpackage, git-buildpackage, etc. I think it could be significantly simpler and easier to use than the complex dance svn-buildpackage uses to try to find or download an upstream tarball, and it could make git-buildpackage's existing code to try and create an .orig.tar.gz much more accurate. -- see shy jo
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