Bug#610298: Goodbye to tarball tangles?

[Nicholas Bamber <nicholas@periapt.co.uk>]

"Considering all the above, it would be nice if policy could start to discourage
tar-in-tar, at least with a "should" (not) requirement. A potentially
appropriate place where to mention that seems to be §4.8 "Restrictions on
objects in source packages"."

This makes perfect sense to me. I have upgraded one package like this and attempted one or two others. It is and looks ghastly.

"And we have them for this reason; or put otherwise, we'd like to get rid of them which requires at least one of two things:
- ftp-masters accept very small packages (which they have declined to
do in the past, a recent request for the current policy is #606411)
- build tools provide a mechanism to build different sub-packages
separately. dpkg with source format v3 alone does not help here (beyond
unpacking etc. the tarballs), http://packages.qa.debian.org/pkg-components
is a first step but still very "young" [0]

I don't mind deprecating bundles with tarballs but just recommending
against them is not enough to make them go away :)"

As Gregor implies, pkg-components is in a very early stage but it is a positive if tentative effort to help get rid of such packages and to provide a definite way of handling "bundles". It does not yet do things like interfacing with uscan, and it needs to offer a bit more in terms of making it easy to update components. As such it is not yet really ready for large bundles. Also it is probably currently more perl specific than originally inteneded. I intend to use it to clean up several of the tarball containing packages in the Debian perl group. I would expect when it has proved its value, it would be incorporated into the debhelper system like quilt support has been in the past. In fact I would be quite happy if this process were to be accelerated by other people suggesting an improvements and contributing to the development.

Since many people are repulsed by the concept of "bundles" I must emphasise why they arise  - even at the risk of straying from the topic a little (and repeating myself). The bundles we have in the Debian Perl group are there because previously small packages were rejected by the ftp masters. These bundles have tarballs in their source and they use a number of scripts to interface with the debhelper system. As debhelper has evolved it has been necessary to update those scripts. However since the scripts are stored in the package and since the packages are largely looked after by different people the packages are not even keeping in sync with each other. In this sense, when someone says these packages are a "PITA" the true horror is left understated. It is to remedy this that the pkg-components project was started (NOT to advocate creation of new bundles) and it was for clarification of the rules that #606411 was raised.