Bug#754463: RFS: pdf2htmlex/0.11+ds-1

[Johannes Schauer <j.schauer@email.de>]

Hi,

Quoting Jakub Wilk (2014-07-16 00:26:09)
> >uscan does this automatically when repacking upstream tarballs.
> 
> I don't believe this is the case. And the .orig.tar you uploaded to 
> mentors certainly contains debian/:

indeed, you are right! I fixed it and the upstream tarball now comes without
the ./debian directory.

> >I don't want to uselessly increase the amount of dependencies of the
> >resulting binary package (even though libpython is probably present on most
> >systems).
> 
> It wouldn't increase the amount of packages required to run pdf2htmlex, 
> at least not for the time being, because libfontforge depends on 
> libpython.

Right.

> The reason linking to unneeded libraries is bad is because it makes Packages
> a tiny bit bigger, makes dependency resolved a tiny bit slower, and becomes
> burdensome when one of the libraries change SONAME.

Thanks for educating me :) I didnt think of especially the SONAME change.

> >Though on the other hand it seems I managed to patch the build system such
> >that it will not use libpython anymore (see patch "no-libpython").
> 
> That's much better. Now, can you do the same with gunicode? :-)

It turns out that doing so was just as simple! :D

> >What is your opinion about the tarball repacking and the Files-Excluded in
> >debian/copyright?
> 
> I don't like it, but I'm not going to stop anybody from using it.

Then I think I will keep using it. I do see that using debian/copyright is the
wrong place for repacking information but I find it easier to list the excluded
files in a declarative way instead of embedding yet another fragile repack
script. I do not think there is another way to state the excluded files from
the original upstream tarball without using a turing complete language than
using Files-Excluded.

Once there is, I'll immediately switch to it.

> Note that currently uscan would generate .orig.tar with wrong version; 
> see bug #753772.

I can confirm that I was missing a uversionmangle in my debian/watch. This is
fixed now.

Thanks a lot for your help!

If that is all, then all then I only need somebody to sponsor this :)

cheers, josch