Re: splat package
David Clarke <gadicath@dishevelled.net> wrote:
> Why is it better to have the debian directory separate to the main
> tarball? I had a read of the thread a little while ago about the
> developers including a debian directory, and am still unsure why this is
> neccessarily a bad thing if the person producing the debs is the
> developer.
For instance, someone might want to produce different Debian packages
than yours. If you ship the debian subdir in the upstream tarball, this
will make it a real pain. Moreover, this will probably require to
repackage the upstream source to remove the debian subdir, and therefore
considerably weaken the trust path to your code (how do you check that
the upstream source is really what upstream distributes, if it has been
repackaged?).
Another reason: what about other distributions? Would you be happy if,
when unpacking an upstream tarball, you got a hundred of useless
top-level directories with some crap for every distribution around?
Yet another one: you *will*, no matter how perfect you are, have to make
modifications to the Debian packaging. Releasing a new upstream version
for changes that are specific to the Debian packaging is stupid, wastes
bandwith and confuses your users.
--
Florent
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