Re: uscan, get-orig-source, and making upstream tarball DFSG-free

[Justin Pryzby <justinpryzby@users.sourceforge.net>]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2005 at 01:43:10AM +0200, Nicolas Boullis wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> [ Hmmm, looks like my mailer ate my message... :-( ]
> 
> For a package of mine, I need to remove a non-free file from every 
> upstream tarball. Doing it by hand is certainly suboptimal, and I 
> might forget to do it.
> 
> I thought about using uscan, with a hand-made script instead of the 
> common uupdate. But that script would be local to the package, and kept 
> in the diff.gz part of the source package. Hence, it is not executable 
> in a freshly-unpacked source package, which means I probably can't use 
> this solution. Am I missing something? Is there a workaround?
> 
> I also thought about using the get-orig-source target of debian/rules to 
> get the newest upstream tarball and cut it down. But as far as I can 
> see, this target looks quite redundant with debian/watch. Are they 
> supposed to interoperate in some way? Is there anyone who actually uses 
> this target?
What I did, in an unofficial package, is to include a
debian/rules:get-orig-source target which simply calls a script,
created in ./debian/ by the .diff.gz.  A prerequisite for that rule is
"permissions", which chmod 755 all the scripts that rules calls.  My
repack script just wgets a statically named file (suboptimal), unpacks
it to a new directory, removes nonfree stuff and binaries, then
repacks it into .orig.tar.gz.  It also fixes some permissions, touches
all the files, because they're pre-1980 which is apparently rejected
by buildd checking scripts, (even though I have severe doubts that
this will ever be uploaded to d.o., for various reasons).  But uscan
was not useful to me, because upstream doesn't have their releases
available in any easily guessable way, as I recall.  Not sufficiently
testable or trivial to bother with, at least.

-- 
Clear skies,
Justin