Re: What to do if the upstream keeps debian directory in original tarball?
Stan Vasilyev <stan.vasilyev@csun.edu> writes:
> On Tuesday 24 January 2006 13:23, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> What I would do if I were you would be to make the changes you need to
>> make to the upstream debian directory to have the package work the way
>> that it should and send the diffs back to upstream as a courtesy, but
>> not wait for a new upstream release with those changes before
>> uploading. When there's a new upstream release, you can then
>> resynchronize, make whatever changes are still needed, and upload a new
>> package.
> My mentors taught me that a Debian package should be build from the
> pristine upstream source downloaded from official website. In this case
> it wouldn't work because the Debian .diff.gz applies to a version of
> upstream source before it is officially released.
Right, you want to do your packaging against the latest released version
for the upload. If you want to separately forward-port your packaging to
his next release candidate and send him a patch, that's very nice of you,
but I would make it clear to him that you can't do the official Debian
package that way; for the official package, it's strongly preferred to
work from the last official release.
>> I don't think removing an upstream debian directory is sufficient
>> reason to repackage the upstream source. You can do the packaging as
>> diffs against the upstream debian directory just as easily. Heck, if
>> what upstream ships there is too annoying, you can always just blow
>> away the debian directory in your working copy, create your own
>> packaging, and let diff figure out the transform (although be careful
>> of upstream files that you need to delete in your version).
> But I end up repackaging the upstream source anyway. The .orig.tar.gz
> is not the same file that Thierry puts on his website.
Why? Do you have to remove some files for DFSG-compliance?
> Plus, I usually look at the .diff.gz file to check the quality of a
> package. With xdialog it's hard to do because there always is garbage
> from the old version of debian directory in the diff.gz.
filterdiff -z -x '*/debian/*' xdialog*.diff.gz
filterdiff is part of the patchutils package.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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