Re: RFS: GNU FreeDink
2008/8/20 Sylvain Beucler <beuc@beuc.net>:
>> 1) Some of the tarballs include debian/ and their diffs are empty. In
>> my opinion upstream tarballs should not include the debian/ directory.
>
> I thought about it, and I concluded when the maintainer is part of the
> upstream team (or in this case, _is_ upstream), it makes things easier
> to keep 'debian/' upstream too.
>
> I saw suggestions to place 'debian/' separately, but they usually
> lacked elaboration, so I couldn't tell whether that applied to
> freedink. On the contrary I saw discussion about a packager having
> commit access to maintain upstream's debian/ and that was considered
> good.
>
> So far it seems better for me not to separate 'debian/' :)
There are a few reasons I can think if right now:
1) Debian is not the only distribution that uses debian/ for the
package sources, all its derivatives do. By shipping debian/ in the
orig tarball you're making it harder for them to customize the
packaging, and harder to read their diff files
2) Modifications in the packaging will likely force you to make you a
new release of the program. It can be quite annoying and inconvenient
for non-debian based distros.
3) In case someone has to NMU one of your packages, it'll be harder,
the diff file would be more cryptic. In fact, even though you can
modify and add new files to debian/, as wierd as it might read in the
diff, you cannot delete any of them
It's perfectly valid for upstream to have their debian/ directory in
their own versioning system, but when generating the release tarball
it's much better to remove it from there and have it included in the
diff. That's what the diff is for, in any case.
Greetings,
Miry
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