Bug#907727: Empty directory is already present in orig tarball
Felix Lechner <felix.lechner@lease-up.com> writes:
> An override is more explicit, and also more self-explanatory, when
> compared to a '.placeholder'.
To me, an override implies that Lintian is wrong, and I don't think it
is. (Whether the tag should exist is a different question; not all
problems are worth fixing.) It's bad practice to ship empty directories
in tarballs precisely because they're not representable in Git (and
generally have a tendency to get lost in various ways).
> I re-read our prior messages, but still do not see why the ability to
> round-trip through Git is so important. Either way, the issue should
> IMHO be fixed in the tool chain that processes such round trips. Then we
> can remove the tag from Lintian.
I don't know that it's so important. It feels like minor to pedantic.
It's just an avoidable minor issue.
> How would a placeholder created in debian/rules (or dh) help with the
> round-tripping issue? Does anyone create source packages from built
> source trees?
It means that if anything relied on the directory existing, the directory
would be recreated by unpacking the source package and whatever relied on
that would succeed.
You're correct that it doesn't help with keeping the directory in the
source package; it just makes sure it's created by the build step before
anything might use it.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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