Re: How to include information about a source package ?
George Danchev <danchev@spnet.net> writes:
> On Sunday 30 April 2006 10:05, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> Well, discussing it is exactly what I'm doing right now. :) Obviously
>> if I can't convince anyone here, there's no point in filing a bug
>> against the Developer's Reference for a change that has no consensus.
> I failed to see what is wrong with the DevRef. The mentioned paragraph
> about repackaged orig.tar.gz says that:
> 1) repackaging <must be> be documented in README.whatever
> 2) and that <it is also a good idea to provide a get-orig-source target> to
> automate the repackaging process.
> As far as I understand your intention is to change this to:
> 1) as a "good idea"
> 2) as a "must"
No, I would instead say:
* Repackaging must be documented in debian/copyright, and if the
repackaging means that anything a user may expect to be present is
missing, that must be documented in README.Debian.
* A get-orig-source target must be provided if it's feasible to automate
the repackaging. (There are cases where it's not, but those are
generally cases involving a complex construction of different sources
that would have to be documented in debian/copyright anyway since
debian/copyright must contain the details of where the source was
obtained.)
I would remove all mention of README.Debian-source; I don't think
including a separate file is ever a good idea. debian/copyright is the
appropriate location for this information, in my opinion.
I don't think this is any sort of huge issue, btw. I just want to be sure
that I'm clearly stating what my opinion is, since people seem to keep
misunderstanding what I'm saying.
> Hm, I think that both 1) and 2) must be a "must" because we have
> different audiencies: experienced users/developers who need and
> understand the automation target, and mortal end users who are just
> interested in simple words describing what has been changed and how
> within the non-DFSG-compliant upstream tarball.
Yes, I don't want to lose the simple discussion; in fact, I want to make
it more prominent. I think repackaging is important enough to be recorded
in a file that's installed in the resulting binary packages as well, in
the location that's already the official Debian location for information
about the upstream source.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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