Re: Git and tarballs

[Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>]

On Wed, 06 Jul 2011, Wolodja Wentland wrote:
> Tarball only
> ============
> 
> Branches
> --------
> 
> Name                    Local/Remote    Merges From     Tracks
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> master                  local           n/a             alioth/master
> upstream                local           n/a             alioth/upstream
> pristine-tar            local           n/a             alioth/pristine-tar
> alioth/master           remote          n/a
> alioth/upstream         remote          n/a
> altoth/pristine-tar     remote          n/a
> 
> Workflow
> --------
> 
> Tarballs are downloaded from upstream and merged with git-import-orig, 
> orig tarballs are constructed from upstream + pristine-tar.
> 
> Questions
> ---------
> 
> * Is pristine-tar *really* needed here as it will basically say "No change from
>   upstream"? 
>   I have to confess that I don't quite see the merit of pristine-tar
>   when generating tarballs as those should be exactly the same tarball
>   as produced by "git archive TAG. Or am I missing something here?

You are missing the fact that the two tarballs will be different because:
1/ the files in the archive might not be in the same order
2/ the "gzip" compression might be different (it embeds a timestamp and
   the name of the original file by default)

The goal of pristine-tar is to regenerate exactly the same tarball (i.e.
same MD5/SHA1/etc. checksum).

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

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