Re: Pristine source from upstream VCS repository

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Thu, Mar 05, 2009 at 08:39:50PM +1100, Ben Finney a écrit :
> 
> I've proposed a patch to policy (in bug#466550) to bring policy in
> line with this practice.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=466550#42

 	      <p>
-		This target is optional, but providing it if
-		possible is a good idea.
+		Commonly, upstream developers will make canonical
+		original source archive files for specific versions
+		available for direct public download, and the
+		‘uscan(1)’ tool can automate this task with an
+		appropriate ‘debian/watch’ configuration file. This
+		target is therefore optional, and required only for
+		those cases not satisfied by ‘uscan(1)’.


Hi Ben,

at the same time, your patch would make it mandatory to write a get-orig-source
target when uscan(1) can not do the job. Since there are sometimes upstreams
who change the contents of the tarball without changing its name, it means that
it is impossible to be sure that uscan can do the job, and therefore that we
would all need to use complex get-orig-source targets that monitor the contents
of the upstream tarballs. Can you soften your wording to the current "optional"
status ?

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan