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.
Munging the upstream source to remove all the generated files means
diverging from the upstream source tarball and losing verifiability, etc.
See xfonts-jmk for a complex example. See shibboleth-sp2 for a package
that has one generated file also included in the package which is changed
as part of the build process. I don't want to keep carrying a diff for
that file, so I remove it in debian/rules clean. This means that
debian/rules clean doesn't restore the source to exactly the same state as
an unpack, but it's in *functionally* the same state since that file will
be regenerated as part of a build and no useful information has been lost.
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.
There used to be far more of these, but dh-autoreconf goes to the effort
of stashing the files and restoring them on debian/rules clean, since
someone did the effort of centralizing that support in one place. But
it's a lot of work to expect individual maintainers to do for one-off
cases.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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