Re: Source format 3.0?

[twb@cybersource.com.au (Trent W. Buck)]

Joachim Breitner <nomeata@debian.org> writes:

> should we consider turning on the new source format for our packages?
> If we have patches, we mostly use quilt anyways, so no big change
> needed there. For other packages, there is no big improvement by using
> 3.0, right?

I'm using 3.0 already for my packages (including Darcs).  For me, the
advantages are

  - No Build-Depends on quilt, and no --with quilt in dh(1) calls.
  - Easier to read debian.tar.gz (than diff.gz) in Emacs.
  - Auto-excludes VCS metadata, backup~ files &c from the debian.tar.gz.

> One could, however, easily include the debian/_darcs directory in the
> debian-tarball with 3.0.

AFAIK dpkg-source automatically excludes VCS dirs in 3.0 format.

I agree that there are advantages to including (distributed) VCS'
metadata in the .orig.tar.gz and .debian.tar.gz, but IIRC lintian and
dpkg-source both actively discourage it, and I haven't tried to fight
them.

You could argue that appropriate VCS-* fields in debian/control are a
comparitively small overhead for the source tarballs, and all that you
need to do is teach dget or apt-get source to fetch that instead of the
tarballs...