Hello, On Sat, Dec 30 2017, Alexandre Detiste wrote: > Here's an example of some ugly get-orig-source: > https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/pkg-games/steamcmd.git/tree/debian/rules > > Mea Culpa :-) > > > The software's version is some timestamp of a file inside a tarball: > bad; I don't really want this scheme supported in uscan; better left > it here only. Wow. Thanks for sharing this! Previously, I neglected to respond to the latter part of Bill's message: On Fri, Dec 29 2017, Bill Allombert wrote: > On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 06:57:55PM +0000, Sean Whitton wrote: > >> We're not rendering those packages buggy with this change, because >> it's fine to continue to have a get-orig-source target. We're just >> reducing the documented interfaces of packages a bit based on current >> trends, which is useful for newcomers to Debian. > > So the only result of removing the mention of the optional > get-orig-source target from policy is that it will appear in some > debian/rules but not be documented anymore. I do not see how this can > be helpful to newcomers. They will still be exposed to it without > having the documentation in policy. > > It would be more useful to kept it but to add a note toward migrating > to uscan if possible. By removing it from Policy what we're saying is that there is no standardised get-orig-source rule. This is because most packages should use d/watch, and because the definition of get-orig-source was problematic, as discussed by Simon and Russ. It doesn't make sense as part of our standard interface to source packages. Now, many packages do things in addition to the standard source package interfaces. For example, my package src:ublock-origin pulls upstream versions using git subtrees; it's quite complicated, and documented in README.source. I would not expect to Policy to have anything to say about this use of git subtrees, because it's not something that can really be generalised as a solution to some problem Debian source packages are meant to solve. Similarly, retaining get-orig-source for weird cases like steamcmd is now a workaround for weird upstreams. And we should not expect Policy to have anything to say about workarounds. They are meant to be documented in README.source. -- Sean Whitton
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