Proposal: debian/include
Hello,
In the olden days (OK, I am guessing here) people used to hack away at
upstream's source directory, trusting that all changes were recorded
in the *.diff.gz file. The trend is now to have only debian/ present
in *.diff.gz, and with all the packager's modifcations in debian/
patches/, controlled by dpatch, quilt or some other system.
I propose that this trend is made more explicit, by adding to policy
an optional file, debian/include, that explicitly lists what files/
directories outside of debian/ should be included in *.diff.gz. The
format of that file should allow for comments explaining why those
particular parts are needed in the diff.gz.
Why is this needed? Personally, I have met several situations where I
-- intentionally or not -- have dropped temporary files, scripts,
notes to myself, copies of source files, etc. in source directories
which i later to my dismay discover end up in the .diff.gz file.
Also, if you for some reason need to re-run the GNU autotools, the
whole directory tree will contain Makefile.in's aclocal.m4 or other
files generated by that system, that you meticuously have to remove in
the clean target of debian/rules in order for the source package to
build properly and cleanly.
The existence of an empty debian/include file -- or perhaps the
absense of the file -- would signal to the build system to ignore
everything outside of debian/ for inclusion in the *.diff.gz. If, for
some reason, you really want changes to the source tree, just name
those files or directories in debian/include.
Simple, clear and efficient.
Cheers,
Morten
--
Morten Kjeldgaard
mok0@ubuntu.com
Key fingerprint = FC53 53B2 81D1 27CA 45D5 F864 078C F31B 4048 25E7
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