Re: purging upstream source tarball, or not?
Sébastien Barthélemy <barthelemy@crans.org> writes:
> Hi,
>
> I'm trying to package libcolladadom, and I get a few generic questions.
> I already asked them in the RFS [1], but later realized that I would get a
> wider audience asking them separately. So here I am.
>
> Besides collada-dom, the upstream svn and tarballs include several
> related programs, which I do not plan to build. They are either
> - dependancies (such as pcre) which are already packaged separately in
> debian,
Those should not be there, if at all possible, when you build the
source. For that you have 3 options (in order of preference):
1) Get upstream to remove them.
2) Remove them in the clean target.
3) Repackage the orig tarball.
The tarball should only be repackaged when there is no alternative, e.g.
some file is non-free and must be removed so the source can be in
main. Which usualy means for leagal reasons. Doesn't seem like this
applies here so 1 or 2 would be your options.
If you can't remove code copies, e.g. because they are modified
versions, then you need to tell the security team about them and they
will note that so security bugs in the original also flag the copies for
inspection. Again doesn't sound like it is the case here but just for
completness sake.
> - or distinct programs, which work with or depend on collada-dom, and
> are released with it. They could be built and packaged in debian, from
> the same source package, but I won't do it myself (at least not now).
> I think some of these additional programs should go in contrib, because
> they use nvidia-cg, whereas collada-dom is fit to main.
>
> Should I remove the extraneous source files, or keep them? In the current
> version I kept them.
>
> [1] http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-mentors@lists.debian.org/msg69243.html
>
> Thank you for your help, and please don't hesitate to point me to the
> relevant doc.
I think a source in main can build binary package for contrib. So no
reason to remove anything just because it should go to contrib. I also
see no reason to remove sources that are not code copies. They do no
harm and maybe later you want to build them and then you just have to
undelete them again. Removing those files in the clean target won't save
any space and you shouldn't repackage the orig tarball unneccessarily.
So there really is no point in removing them.
MfG
Goswin
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