Re: Removing parts of upstream tar-ball, parsers, autobuilding

[Felipe Sateler <fsateler@gmail.com>]

Y Giridhar Appaji Nag wrote:

> Hello World!,
> 
> I have a bunch of questions:
> 
> 1. I have an upstream source tar-ball that accidentally includes some
> files that are generated (and cleaned when a make distclean is issued)
> using the build system, and it is not necessary that I include those
> files in the orig.tar.gz file.  These files are not binary files.
> 
> Now, the best thing to do would be to copy the upstream tar-ball as-is
> to orig.tar.gz and have a patch that removes these files (this will
> result in a big diff).  However, is it OK to create an orig.tar.gz file
> based on the upstream tar-ball with these files removed?  Do maintainers
> create a new orig.tar.gz based on the upstream tar-ball and use it (even
> in the non pkg-modified-to-be-dfsg case)?

If you take care to properly clean it before building (dirty builds can
cause problems), then there should be no problem in just shipping the dirty
tarball. Do not overcomplicate over not-so-important matters (After all,
the source is easily cleanable, right?). Note that dpkg-buildpackage calls
clean before build, so you should only have to take care to handle this
case in the clean rule.

 
> 3. Related to the above: do our autobuilders re-build all packages that
> Build-Depend on a newly uploaded package?  Or, are bugs like the above
> handled when (a) People voluntarily build the package or a part of the
> archive once in a while (b) A new version of the package that
> Build-Depends on the parser-generator is uploaded.

There is no automatic infrastructure to build all packages. What could
happen is that the release team could trigger a rebuild (binNMUs) of all
the Build-Dependent packages if need be, but they have to be notified of
the issue.

-- 

  Felipe Sateler