Re: Proposal new source archive format
Ben Collins wrote:
> The second case would be like I have to deal with in shadow. While the
> author of shadow updates the debian/ with every release (and is an avid
> Debian user), shadow's upstream releases are few and far between. Which
> means I have an oudated debian/ to keep up with. I moved to Adam Heath's
> first incarnation of this build system for little more reason than to get
> away from this upstream directory since it was a pain to modify all those
> files. In this case the source-package program would note that I have
> %.debian.tar.gz in the .dsc and would unpack the .orig.tar.gz excluding
> debian/ so as to avoid conflicts.
That sounds like a nasty special case. Especially when you keep in mind
we want this system to be something that can be understood and debian
sources unpacked by hand without using any special tools, special cases
begin to sound like a very bad idea.
A better idea would be to allow it to be either a debian diff or a debian
tarball, and use a tarball in this case.
> Also note that I am of the belief that it is better to build like this:
>
> foo-1.0/
> debian/
> foo-src/
>
> ...than our current layout of putting debian/ in the same directory as the
> original source.
Wichert's spec allows for this:
dir|directory <dir>
directory in which to apply a patch or extract an
archive. If the directory does not exist it will be
created.
That said, I don't much like this as a required or default usage. It seems
like a small change, but it is conceptually a very large change from the
current paradigm. It changes how you look at upstream sources. I do think the
new package format should be flexible enough to allow this, Aj's example of
netbase is a package where it's clearly necessary to be able to say that a
tarball unpacks into a sibdirectory.
> Which would make all of the above issues even easier
> since using the upstream debian/ will be as simple as running "ln -s
> foo-src/debian debian" by the source-package program dependent on whether
> a %.debian.tar.gz is included in the .dsc or not.
That's another special case though.
--
see shy jo
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