Re: what to do when upstream package is shipped with MB of dependencies ?
On Sun, 13 Sep 2009, Jérémy Lal wrote:
> I'm in a situation where upstream tarball is not very nice;
> e.g. it's shipped with 3MB of dependencies, most of which
> are already packaged.
> I suppose a patch has no meaning here, since it consists in removing
> the dependencies from the tarball. Another patch consists in
> correcting the makefile to use already installed libraries instead
> of rebuilding them. That one could be meaningfull.
You should (must, IMO) fix the building so that it uses only the
libraries that Debian distributes. See policy §4.13.
> Is doing a get-orig-source taking care of cleaning up upstream
> a good solution ?
The correct solution is to get upstream to distribute the dependencies
in a separate tarball (if they distribute them at all).
Baring that, there's little reason to remove the dependencies unless:
1) you're already repacking the source
2) they're large in comparison to the actual distributed code
in either case, I'd strongly consider writing a get-orig-source target
which dealt with removing the superfluous bits of source.
Don Armstrong
--
He quite enjoyed the time by himself in the mornings. The day was too
early to have started going really wrong.
-- Terry Pratchet _Only You Can Save Mankind_ p133
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu
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