Re: Debian breaking GPL (Was: Re: Bug#32758: userv: non-maintainer upload (alpha) diffs)

[Richard Braakman <dark@xs4all.nl>]

Brederlow wrote:
> How does it work? Does it incoporate incremental diffs? It would be
> real nice if one could upload just the diff that fixes a bug for arch
> foo and specify that that is an arch foo only patch. For stuff like
> arch fixes of frozen packages, where one doesn't want to break other
> archs.  dpkg-source -x would apply all patches in order and omit
> patches that are not ment for the current arch.

There's no need for that, I think.  For one thing, we don't have
a source format for multiple patches yet.  And most Debian diffs
are pretty small.  (In most cases, they can share a .orig.tar.gz file.)

It'll work according to some earlier proposals: Simply have the
installer refrain from deleting old source versions, and run a
separate script to delete unused sources.  I've written this script,
but I don't know how much code is in use that assumes that there's
only one version of each source package in the archive.

This is not entirely correct for packages that change their .orig.tar.gz
files without changing the upstream version, and there will be some
trouble with (for example) sources in frozen being removed while they
were still targets of symlinks from unstable.  But it's better than
what we have now, and these failure cases are rare enough to handle
manually.

Mind you, I'm just out to provide this solution.  Whether it gets
adopted is not up to me.

> PS: Doesn't anybody have enough space to keep all old sources in a cvs 
> like (but more compress) manner? Probably not.

I expect a 9 GB disk would be enough for a while.  It shouldn't be hard
to automate such an archive.  But would it have any users?

Richard