disclaimer: This is a theoretical situation
Hello,
there is a problem where I could use some advice about a sane way or
best practise to get out of it:
Assuming I took over maintainership for a package with upstream. So
there is an upstream tarball foo_1.0.orig.tar.xz but, quite frankly,
it's a mess. The creator didn't care about that process and so it
contains a lot of cruft like a populated .git/, backup files, autotools
debris, patches applied, you name it. Therefore I'd like to provide a
clean and much smaller one, ideally one provided by upstream that was
ignored in the past.
However, there might be no newer upstream version so I'd have to
replace foo_1.0.orig.tar.xz with new content, something I consider
unfriendly[1] and that hopefully[2] gets blocked by technical means.
Ideas so far:
* Fake a new upstream version number, like foo_1.0a.orig.tar.xz.
Yes, it's faking. Using "+repack" is more obvious but still means
this gets carried into the Debian version number.
* Switch upstream tarball compression. This works, I found an upload[3]
where -2 switched from .gz to .xz. Still rather a hack[4], and if this
means going away from xz to something older, it feels wrong.
Anything else I could do? It's all a bit first-world-problem-ish and, as
I said, it's a theoretical question. In the actual cases (outside
Debian) I could get out of this situation easily since either there was
a new upstream version, or the source name was a misnomer and needed a
change anyway. I don't expect to have that luck all the time.
Christoph
[1] In my opinion, every file in the Debian repositories that carries a
version number should have unique content over all the time. I found
some history .dsc files on snapshot.d.o that violate this idea, but
I think I should not extend that list.
[2] As this breaks the pool/ layout.
[3] Compare
http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20120317T153349Z/pool/main/f/file/file_5.11-1.dsc
http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20120630T221249Z/pool/main/f/file/file_5.11-2.dsc
[4] Mostly since the tarballs differ after decompression.
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