On Wed, Mar 04, 2009 at 09:08:08PM +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
> I'm not sure how to actually use it in a Debian package though.
>
> Reading the manual pages, I get the impression it's designed to
> produce deltas that upstream then commits in their VCS. If I don't
> have access to commit to the upstream VCS, how can I make use of
> this?
It is in fact mainly used in Debian to store efficiently tarballs
within VCSs, tarball usually released upstream though. The problem
here is that to have checksum-safe upstream tarball, you will indeed
need to convince upstream to use stuff like pristine-tar. I believe
that in general, it will be quit a hard task, as upstream are not
concerned with the problem as much as we are.
What you can do is probably have a 2 level architecture, with a VCS
Debian-side which mirrors upstream VCS (easy with DVCS) but has in
addition the deltas. The first time your tarball fetching tool will
create the tarball and store its delta. The other times it will just
use pristine-tar to check it out.
... but it starts looking like a bit hackish.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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