Re: Status of dgit (good for NMUs and fast-forwarding Debian branches)

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Russ Allbery writes ("Re: Status of dgit (good for NMUs and fast-forwarding Debian branches)"):
> Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> > Or do you mean that you have files in your git branch which are removed
> > by debian/rules clean ?  (I'm no longer ruling anything out merely on
> > the grounds that it would be utterly insane...)
> 
> This is common.  Usually it's because upstream ships generated files in
> the upstream tarball as well as source files.  As part of building the
> Debian package from source, one wants to remove all generated files and
> recreate them.  Deleting those files in debian/rules clean is an obvious
> way to go about this.

I see.  So are those files in the source package or not ?

If they are then, a dgit user who uses git reset, git clean, dgit -wg
and sbuild won't see any problem from this, because they don't run
debian/rules clean in the build tree as part of preparing the source
package.

If they aren't then the dgit tree is not the same as "your" git tree,
which is fine for the NMUer.  It complicates your life as the
maintainer, though.

> Saving all the build products and restoring them on debian/rules clean is
> more trouble than I have any interest in doing, although patches are
> welcome, I suppose.

I think the right answer to these kind of problems is a vpath build,
or the moral equivalent.

Ian.