Re: a few quick questions on gbp pq workflow

[Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org>]

On 08/06/2017 09:15 PM, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> On 2017-08-06 20:00:59 +0100 (+0100), Ghislain Vaillant wrote:
> [...]
>> You'd still have to clean the pre-built files, since they would be
>> overwritten by the build system and therefore dpkg-buildpackage
>> would complain if you run the build twice.
>>
>> So, you might as well just exclude them from the source straight
>> away, no?
> 
> Repacking an upstream tarball just to avoid needing to tell
> dh_install not to copy files from a particular path into the binary
> package seems the wrong way around to me

What's wrong is for upstream to pretend that one tarball / archive is
its released source, when in fact it contains binary / generated files.

A source tarball / archive from upstream must contain *only* source
code, nothing else. If it contains anything that comes from the original
source, then it's additional pain for the package maintainer.

> but maybe I'm missing
> something which makes that particularly complicated? This comes up
> on debian-mentors all the time, and the general advice is to avoid
> repacking tarballs unless there's a policy violation or you can get
> substantial (like in the >50% range) reduction in size on especially
> huge upstream tarballs.

That's one view, probably motivated by the fact it's probably easier to
deal with in the long run. However convenient it may be, I don't think
it feels "clean".

And by the way, when it comes to the OpenStack stuff, FTP masters have
already expressed their dislike of the upstream ChangeLog: it is a *WAY*
to big, at the level of megabytes sometimes, and it may appear in .deb
files that would otherwise be a few kilobytes. All this isn't new...

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)