Re: Native package or not?
* Michal ?iha? <michal@cihar.com> [060212 19:21]:
> I'm author of few programs, that I want to include in Debian. Keeping
> debian directory inside sources and release tarball seems as logical
> step to me because related changes to debian directory will be in
> same changeset as changes in software.
The general suggestion is to not include the debian/ directory in the
release tarball. The reason is that by the format of the Debian source
packages no files can be removed by another person's .diff.gz and some
tools like debhelper act on (non)existance of specific files. So if
anybody else wants to make packages he may need to repack the release
tarball to do so.
> However I'm not sure whether to create native package or not. For now I
> prefer native packages. [...] What is best
> practice for packaging own software?
Besides the problem of a debian/ directory in a source tarball given
above (which is inherited by native packages, as they have the debian
directory in the release tarball by definition), one often told reason
can be non-nativeness of the package to Debian: If you have other users
of your package, which use other distributions than Debian, they might
see a new version of your sources, though you only fixed some mistakes
in the debian directory. With non-native packages those only results in
a new .diff.gz.
Hochachtungsvoll,
Bernhard R. Link
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