Re: Pristine source from upstream VCS repository

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:

> Adeodato Simó <dato@net.com.org.es> writes:
> 
> > From the first paragraph in the manpage, it would seem that
> > pristine-tar just wants a "checkout" of the appropriate revision,
> > i.e. an unpacked tree. So you could checkout that from the
> > upstream VCS, and store the delta in the debian-only VCS, if in
> > fact your packaging VCS is debian-only. (Else, this point is moot.
> > :-)
> 
> I'm fairly sure that pristine-tar as currently implemented needs the
> upstream source to be in Git, whether in your local repository or in
> some remote repository to which you have a reference.

Yes, ‘pristine-tar commit’ and ‘pristine-tar checkout’ AFAICT both
require the VCS to be Git. It would be nice if this could be
de-coupled, but the very concepts used (it requires that the commit
must know “which tag (or branch or other treeish object)” to commit
against) are specific to Git.

I have now experimented a little with ‘pristine-tar gendelta’ and
‘pristine-tar gentar’, and successfully modified my ‘get-orig-source’
so that it can, automatically, exactly reproduce some pre-specified
pristine tarball. This requires explicitly storing the result of
‘pristine-tar gendelta’ in the Debian packaging files, which of course
must be updated every time there is a new upstream version.

Effectively, I've now re-implemented the ‘pristine-tar checkout’
workflow with a little more manual fiddling.

Thanks for the pointers, everyone. I'm glad to find somewhat parallel
work already in place; I will investigate how I can use ‘pristine-tar’
more effectively for this job.

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Ben Finney