Re: RFS: b5

[Panu Kalliokoski <atehwa@sange.fi>]

On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 06:57:38PM +0100, Bas Wijnen wrote:
> I see what you mean.  However, both from a technical point of view, and from a
> philosophical point of view, it makes sense: People who are getting your
> release tarball will not want to build a Debian package (if they did, they'd
> get your Debian (source) package directly).  Also, people who want to use the
> package on other distributions should not be bothered with debian-specific
> stuff.  The fact that they bother us with their .spec files doesn't mean we
> shouldn't be nice to them. ;-)

I see... although I've never been bothered when a source tarball comes
with some inessential crap, such as a .spec, version control files, some
stupid list of contributors, or an automake script :)  Maybe it's just
that I don't "feel like" doing wrong when I give the debian/ subdir even
to people who don't need it.

That said, I'm going to change the packaging, but I still want to see
the outcome of the discussion.

> Having the debian/ directory under version control is useful.  But it
> shouldn't be included in the tarball when you run "make dist".

I've never used "make dist", because there has been nothing I deemed
worth purging from the distribution.  (I don't use autoconf, a notorious
source of need for "make dist" rules.)

> No, it's not especially vulnerable, but because of the strong advise to use
> pristine sources, it's the only part that can actually be split off.  Also,
> splitting the package in many pieces makes it very hard to get and install all
> the pieces, and you probably don't want to inflict that on your users. ;-)

Well, that's exactly the reason I'm reluctant to split the source: if
you can do perfectly well with one source tarball (for debian users,
non-debian users, and the build system), why not do that?  Note that I'm
not going to take the debian/ dir away from my _real_ release sources;
just from the Debian source packages, if Debian really strongly
encourages that.

Panu

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