Re: This topic died off; any resolution?
Daniel Dickinson <cshore@brucetelecom.com> writes:
> I kind of got lost in this discussion. Is there a summary and debian
> policy and debian reference patch so that those of us who are just
> looking to do what we're supposed to do know what we are supposed to do
> and how to do it?
I think where we're at (with get-orig-source) right now is that uscan has
a feature to run a script after downloading the upstream source. That
seems like usually the right way of providing repackaging for new upstream
source releases and I think we should find a way to encourage people to
provide such a script.
debian/rules get-orig-source as an interface to run uscan with the
appropriate options seems like it might be a good idea to keep the
interface consistent. We would need to resolve the question of what
upstream source this should download. I think I would lean towards having
it download the latest upstream release rather than the one mentioned in
the changelog entry because while I see the reason for doing it the other
way, I think that it wouldn't actually make much difference in workflow.
In the unusual case where one wants to download a very specific upstream
release that isn't the one uscan thinks is latest, one can always download
the tarball and run the repacking script on it by hand; with the repacking
script as a separate script, that shouldn't be too many steps.
That still leaves open the question of what get-orig-source should do with
a package that can't use uscan (unversioned upstream files, multiple
upstream tarballs, upstream that uses only a VCS, etc.). Currently,
Policy says that it should download and create a tarball of the most
current upstream sources. I think that makes sense, but it's harder than
doing the most recent blessed sources and might break a lot. It also
leaves one without an easy way of duplicating exactly the tarball that was
uploaded with the Debian package.
I'm not sure we've reached consensus on the whole discussion, but the
above is my current opinion.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: