I recently discovered some unusual behaviour in a source package I was working on. I was using some scripts I put together myself to generate patch series for a debian package. dgit claimed I was creating a new symlink and that creation of a new symlink could not be represented by 3.0 (quilt). So I removed the symlink, dpkg-source called by dgit then warned about "deletion" of said symlink. Furthermore when I extracted the resulting source package the symlink reappeared. After some tracking down it seems a patch *can* create a symlink and that both dpkg-source and "quilt push" will happily apply such a patch. quilt pop on the other hand is not so happy. Sometimes it will remove the patch, sometimes it will complain that it "won't remove cleanly". I haven't figured out the exact trigger. dgit will import a dsc with such a patch, then fail to build a source package from the tree it has just imported complaining about changes that cannot be represented by 3.0 (quilt). not sure what to make of all this. I have attached a source package demonstrating the issue (you will need to grab the orig tarball from the debian archive)
Attachment:
hello_2.10-1+symlink.debian.tar.xz
Description: application/xz
Format: 3.0 (quilt) Source: hello Binary: hello Architecture: any Version: 2.10-1+symlink Maintainer: Santiago Vila <sanvila@debian.org> Homepage: http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/ Standards-Version: 3.9.6 Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 9.20120311) Package-List: hello deb devel optional arch=any Checksums-Sha1: f7bebf6f9c62a2295e889f66e05ce9bfaed9ace3 725946 hello_2.10.orig.tar.gz 692a93f818ec349fbe130bfa3c6f5aff20b01e24 6408 hello_2.10-1+symlink.debian.tar.xz Checksums-Sha256: 31e066137a962676e89f69d1b65382de95a7ef7d914b8cb956f41ea72e0f516b 725946 hello_2.10.orig.tar.gz f8eb5f4161568f7e30874f12bf2d5262ec7cef8ce2eef8353a681a320a81d002 6408 hello_2.10-1+symlink.debian.tar.xz Files: 6cd0ffea3884a4e79330338dcc2987d6 725946 hello_2.10.orig.tar.gz 3a0426222a13f7f40147fd865088f032 6408 hello_2.10-1+symlink.debian.tar.xz