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Re: Debian Policy 4.1.4.0 released



Hi Russ,

On Mon, Jul 02, 2018 at 04:40:43PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > Context: I have run into a few packages that used the +dfsg convention
> > without documenting what they removed from the tarball and I was not
> > able to locally update them. :(
> 
> This is one of the cases that now has a better solution and more standard
> tools than the get-orig-source target, specifically Files-Excluded in
> debian/copyright.  See the documentation of Files-Excluded in uscan(1).

Files-Excluded helps a lot if there exists an upstream tarball for
download (and I actually invented it to get rid of many get-orig-source
scripts in the Debian Med team - nice that it is now widely used).  Git
mode for uscan helps as well in many cases.

However, we have remaining software in not supported VCS and sometimes
upstream throws files on a ftpserver without creating an archive.  I'm
not happy about the policy change that we are now lacking a clear
guideline how to fetch those sources.  I agree with all the deficits of
get-orig-source described in this thread - but I insist that it was an
advantage to say: If you can not write a proper watch file, provide a
target in d/rules which creates the upstream tarball.  Since this does
not exist any more I'm afraid we will end up with more upstream tarballs
a third person will not have any clue how to fetch the source.  IMHO
that's an unfortunate change in policy.

Kind regards

         Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de


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