[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Debian choice of upstream tarballs for packaging



On 2021-08-25 16:11:37 +0200 (+0200), Thomas Goirand wrote:
[...]
> I wrote this many times, but I don't see why we should use any "upstream
> tarball" when the Git repository itself contains the tarball with:
> 
> git archive --prefix=$(DEBPKGNAME)-$(VERSION)/ $(GIT_TAG) \
> 	| xz >../$(DEBPKGNAME)_$(VERSION).orig.tar.xz
> 
> (which leads to a .xz, which is nicer)

This is a very absolutist statement. As pointed out in prior
discussions, not everything which makes it into an upstream's
release tarball is necessarily tracked in revision control. And for
things which are tracked in revision control, they may sometimes
need to be extracted from the revision control metadata rather than
kept within the worktree, so would not be included by naive git
archive output. You could perform the necessary steps to
extract/assemble this data at package build time, but may need a
copy of the actual upstream Git repository on hand in order to do
so. Some of these extracted files may even be referenced in
copyrights (e.g. an AUTHORS file), with reliance on the worktree
contents alone leading to a legally undistributable downstream copy.

> Not only then, only only has to merge the upstream tag in the Debian
> branch to get the new release, but on top, no need to "gbp import" or
> "pristine-tar commit", and a single packaging branch becomes enough.
[...]

Yes, if you have the upstream Git repository, things like revision
history can be accessed when generating the source package. However,
if upstream already supplies signed source release tarballs with
this extracted for you, and guarantees through testing that they
don't omit files from the worktree in their official tarballs,
redoing all that at source package build time does seem marginally
obsessive (though I suppose that's fine so long as you actually
remember to do it).
-- 
Jeremy Stanley

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: PGP signature


Reply to: