Bug#470960: 6.7.8.2: point 4 (use foo-ver.orig for repacked tarballs) seems backwards

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 07:40:23PM +0000, Jon Dowland a écrit :
> 
> Quoting 6.7.8.2 Repackaged upstream source point 4:
> 
>         [A repackaged .orig.tar.gz] should use
>         <packagename>-<upstream-version>.orig as the name of
>         the top-level directory in its tarball. This makes
>         it possible to distinguish pristine tarballs from
>         repackaged ones.
> 
> That would suggest you would have
> 
>         foo-ver         pristine upstream tarball
>         foo-ver.orig    repacked upstream tarball
> 
> This seems to be confusing. I think common practice is to
> append to the upstream version, either dfsg (if that's why
> you have repacked) or other tags depending on the reason. I
> think this point (4) should be dropped, and the
> version-tagging expanded.

Dear Jon and everybody,

I just read #470960 and agree with Jon's comment. It is strange to signal that
a package is repacked by appending ‘.orig’ to the name of its top level
directory. I am not aware of any of our infrastructures that would rely on this
string to detect repacking, and my impression is that this recommendation of
the Developers Reference is largely ignored, so this suggests that we could
safely recommend to use another suffix than ‘.orig’. How about ‘.repacked’?
That would be straightforward for everybody.

Jon proposes that when a string is appended to the version number itself, it is
not necessary to add a suffix to the tarball's top level directory. This could
be added as an exception to the recommendation.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan