Re: packaging manual/ policy seem to *discourage* pristine source
On 12 Jun 1999, Adam Di Carlo wrote:
> > I like to consider the source code (.c files, etc) and it's transfer
> > encoding (.tar.gz) to be seperate. if you repack it, or recompress it, all
> > you are doing is changing the way it is delivered not what is being
> > delivered which is really what we want to preserve.
>
> This is a bizarre interpretation. Pristine upstream source is and
> always has been one thing and one thing only:
I'd call that pristine upstream archive, it simply places unnecessary
restructions on how we can package the source code and I don't think it
buys us anything worth sacrificing a smaller archive for.
> People want to be able to build the Debian version, and already have
> the original upstream tarball, i.e., they were installing in another
> OS or something (conservation of bandwidth).
dpkg-source could support unpacking from an alternate .orig.gz, we
-already- have this problem when the maintainer ships .bz2 and .gz
versions as we will pick the wrong one for some people [like the kernel, I
download the .bz2 all the time, so the current source method is useless] -
pristine archives do not help this issue.
> Or suppose I'm beta-testing a pre-release, then I wanna beta test the
> debian source package of the same pre-release -- should I have to
> redownload the upstream source, just because we like gzip -9 ?
I don't understand this..
> > Obviously recompression (and largely conversion) does not effect any other
> > forms of comparision between archives so it is harmless.
>
> Well, this argument might make some sense if dpkg-source *itself* made
> an md5sum on the uncompressed tarball.
Maybe it should!
> > It seems to me that when we agreed on pristine source we all thought
> > it was something else :<
>
> I dunno -- your definition is pretty new to me.... In fact, your
> intepretation isn't really supported in any of the debian tools
> (dscverify, dpkg-source, etc).
Well, no more than your definition. Mine at least justifies the current
method of repacking things like zip files and incorperates the new
proposal of maximizing compression.
Our current system is just as lacking in implementing the idea of pristine
archives, it cannot handle anything but a subset of available .tar.gz
files :<
Jason
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