Re: get-orig-source and standardized source repacking (was: Debian Policy 4.1.4.0 released)
On Fri, 06 Jul 2018 at 08:16:12 +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> Just yesterday
> I had an example where the upstream download archive is lacking some
> files from upstream SVN which need to be merged in to enable building
> the software[1].
This often happens in Autotools packages whose upstream developer works
from git, produces (but does not use) dist tarballs, and does not use
`make distcheck`. You don't particularly need to repack the orig tarball
for this: what I normally do is to put the missing file in `debian/dist`
and copy it into place during the build.
The only times repacking the orig tarball is required are:
- there is non-distributable content in it
- there is non-free content in it (and it isn't in the non-free component)
- it isn't available in a format supported by dpkg (with the extreme case
of this being that there is no orig tarball at all, only a VCS repository)
You might also choose to repack it if there's enough free-but-unnecessary
content to be a practical problem, either because it would require you
to put an impractical amount of missing source code in
debian/missing-sources or just because it's very large.
smcv
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