Re: GMAP -- Align mRNA and EST sequences to a genome

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Wed, May 12, 2010 at 11:14:40AM -0700, Shaun Jackman a écrit :
> On 11 May 2010 22:01, Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> wrote:
> ...
> > Please consider adding a ‘pristine-tar’ branch if it is easy for you.
> > http://wiki.debian.org/PackagingWithGit#pristine-tar
> 
> Since the pristine tar can be downloaded from either the upstream site
> or from ftp.debian.org, it seems redundant to be able to rebuild the
> pristine tar from version control as well. What's the purpose?

Hi Shaun,

the purpose is offline work.

With a git repository like the one you prepared, one can create a full source
package, since it contains the upstream sources, but there is a problem: unless
both the upstream and Debian developers pass the --no-name option to gzip (and
use the same compression level), the md5 sum of the orig.tar.gz file will not
be the same as the one of the tarball distributed upstream, since gzip includes
some timestamp information (I admit it is not obvious that --no-name also
implies no timestamp). And if the md5sum of the orig.tar.gz changes but not its
version number, the upload will be automatically rejected. With the
pristine-tar system, if one creates a source package from a git repository, it
will be uploadable to Debian without headaches.

This said, this is not a vital issue :)

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles