Re: should I talk to upstream?
On Thu, Apr 28, 2005 at 01:53:19PM +0300, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> I intend to package a project called "argtable", mostly because I want
> to use it in my own package, rsyncrypto, in order to make it less Linux
> specific. There are two issues that come to mind:
> 1. The source directory naming of upstream is "argtable2", instead of
> the expected "argtable-2.4".
> 2. The author seems to keep the "1" series version around, since version
> 2 introduced some incompatibilities.
>
> I intend to ignore the second problem, so that if it ever comes up we
> can call the other argtable "argtable1". What should I do about the
> first problem, though? Should I repackage the original source (and
> remove on of the examples compiled for FreeBSD left behind in it, while
> at it). Should I use the original source package as is? Should I contact
> upstream and ask him to change the way he names the directories?
No need to repackage, dpkg-source handles this situation fine. If
there's only one directory in a tarball, dpkg-source will rename that
one to package-version, if there are more than one entries, they'll all
get unpackaged in package-version.
The only reasons to repack would be to:
- drop undistributeable/non-free stuff out
- because your source package is a collection of tarballs or other
documents not available in .tar.gz (such as a languages package, or
documentation obtained with wget -r, or by means of $VERSIONCONTROL
checkout)
- the upstream tarball is *really* braindead, for example, contains
a debian dir with tons of files that hurt your packaging badly or make
it impossible, or it contains things like sockets or device nodes.
In as far as I can see every other case, it's prefereable to have a
pristine original source, making it much easier to verify that the
.orig.tar.gz is genuinly upstream's.
--Jeroen
--
Jeroen van Wolffelaar
Jeroen@wolffelaar.nl (also for Jabber & MSN; ICQ: 33944357)
http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl
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