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Re: please avoid writing useless/annoying stuff in debian/gbp.conf



Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu> writes:

> From time to time I hear this statement.  I can confirm that in all
> teams I'm working on pristine-tar belongs to the team policy and I never
> experienced in those > 2000 packages I've touched any problem with this.
> For me this makes some statistically relevant set which makes me believe
> that blaming pristine-tar to be broken in many ways is exaggerating and
> should not become a reason to force standard options that would really
> break pristine-tar.

My understanding is that most of the problems with pristine-tar come with
time.  If the tarballs and delta files are created and then read by
software versions reasonably close in time to each other, it generally
works.  The more obscure or ancient the versions of tar and xz were, or
the more options were used, to create the tarballs, the more likely that
if you go back to oldstable and try to recreate the tarballs, you may have
problems.

I'm personally fine with that as a pristine-tar user since I consider it a
convenience rather than a primary data store.  If it works, I don't have
to go find the upstream tarball.  If it doesn't work, I can download the
upstream tarball from the archive and use it directly, and all that
pristine-tar failing costs me is some time.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)              <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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