Bug#492661: developers-reference: Bogus phrasing about .orig.tar.gz repackaging.
On 23/01/09 at 00:30 +0000, Stuart Prescott wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> > -<emphasis role="strong">must</emphasis> contain detailed information how
> the
> > -repackaged source was obtained, and how this can be reproduced in the
> > +<emphasis role="strong">must</emphasis> be documented. Detailed information
> on how the
> > +repackaged source was obtained, and on how this can be reproduced must be
> provided in
> > <filename>debian/copyright</filename>.
>
> What format should this "detailed" description be in? How detailed?
>
> * A description in words of what was done: "The non-free font files were
> deleted from the source tarball"
>
> * A description in commands of what was done: "find -name \*.ttf -delete"
>
> * A brief description with a pointer to a log of what was done? "The non-free
> font files were were stripped from the downloaded file to create the 'orig'
> source package. See the file README.Debian-source for full details."
>
> I like the last of these the best, where the log file is generated from a
> standard (yet to be decided!) repackaging tool that clearly shows what was
> originally downloaded and what was done to it.
>
> Perhaps it's also time to start thinking about how the machine-readable
> copyright files [1] fit into this.
>
> [1] http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/CopyrightFormat
>
> Since the point of the machine-readable copyright proposal is to remove
> arbitrary free form lumps of text from this file, it is perhaps opportune to
> consider the side-effects of this new language on that proposal which mandate
> the inclusion of unspecified amounts of "details". (Despite the efforts of
> two or three contributors to the copyright format proposal, there is still
> nowhere to include anything about repackaging; the suggested fields are
> routinely removed -- perhaps this illustrates a shortcoming of a wiki for
> writing such documents more than anything else!)
Hi,
The role of developers-reference is to document existing good practices
and to advertise them, not to discuss changes in the way we handle such
things. I personally think that README.source is a mess, because it
results in everybody redocumenting basic quilt/dpatch usage.
If you feel strongly about any of the above, please start a discussion
on -devel@. The outcome could be in the developers-reference, of course.
> > It is also a good idea to provide a
> > <literal>get-orig-source</literal> target in your
> > <filename>debian/rules</filename> file that repeats the process, as
> described
>
> Is this wording is slightly at odds with what policy 4.9? (Although that is a
> matter of interpretation that can't be agreed upon, it would seem, see
> #466550.)
>
> > get-orig-source (optional)
> >
> > This target fetches the most recent version of the original source
> > package from a canonical archive site (via FTP or WWW, for example), does
> > any necessary rearrangement to turn it into the original source tar file
> > format described below, and leaves it in the current directory.
>
> Thus policy currently states that get-orig-source should (a) fetch the tarball
> and (b) repackage it, while the wording in that patch to devref only has
> get-orig-source repackaging the tarball.
Right, could you please provide a patch that fixes that part?
> There is then the old chestnut of what one means by "most recent" source for
> the get-orig-source target. Presumably one doesn't mean the most recent
> release from upstream as we already have uscan to do that. Using
> get-orig-source only to do the repackaging to regenerate the debian orig
> tarball would seem to make the most sense.
>
> I wonder if the work to clean up this part of devref actually needs to be part
> of a wider effort to work out what is meant by get-orig-source and to
> appropriately document it. Placing yet another divergent interpretation of
> get-orig-source into devref doesn't seem to work towards that goal.
Yup, best is probably to rediscuss all of this. I'm not sure if it's
worth it, though.
Have fun :)
Note: this bug will be closed during the next upload. If you think that
any of the above really needs to be fixed in devref, please open a new
one, so it doesn't get forgotten.
--
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
| jabber: lucas@nussbaum.fr GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |
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