David Paleino skrev:
I'm not recreating the tarball. The first times I was making packages, my sponsors told me that the result of "debuild clean" (or fakeroot debian/rules clean) had to be the same as the original tarball unpacked + debian/. Is this wrong?
I'd qualify that somewhat. It's certainly good practice; the idea is that building again never results in something different, and it's good to be clean anyway. However, if doing that is difficult (such as if upstream forgot to run distclean and left cruft in the orig tarball), I think it's also reasonable to follow the following rule (considering dpkg-buildpackage will invoke clean before building):
Original tarball + debian diff + debuild clean = debuild + debuild clean or, failing that, at least the fundamental rule:Original tarball + debian diff + debuild + debuild clean = another debuild + debuild clean
You should never break this last rule, but the stricter rule you're currently following is not really worth bending over backwards for IMHO.