Re: a few quick questions on gbp pq workflow

[Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org>]

On 08/07/2017 12:20 AM, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> Thomas references the AUTHORS and ChangeLog files (which embed
> important metadata from the revision control system into the release
> tarball, far from useless in my opinion); but taking the
> nova-15.0.0.tar.gz release for example, those two files account for
> a total of 5% of the unpacked tree according to du and probably
> compress fairly well. By comparison, the unit tests and fixtures
> make up 42% of the size of the tree on their own. He's also
> referring to a situation from _years_ ago, which was subsequently
> changed after he asked... those current tarballs only include author
> names and very abbreviated information parsed out of the git log and
> have been that way since 2013 (pbr commit 94a6bb9 released in 0.6),
> but mentioning that would likely have undermined his argument.

Jeremy, you still don't get it, sorry, it probably is my fault.


Using upstream sdist tarballs, we get a ChangeLog file. Due to all the
automation inside dh_* helpers, if nobody takes care of it, then
ChangeLog files automatically gets pushed into each and every individual
.deb files. This mean that even a tiny metapackage will get it, even if
it doesn't carry anything else but dependency information.

Multiply this by so many packages that the OpenStack package maintainer
have to deal with, adding such manual removal of the ChangeLog file in
each package is too much of a pain, when it's not needed at all if we're
using the upstream git as a source.

That, plus generated docs, and so many things that the sdist is
attempting to deal with, which we don't really want. It may even forget
to package some files for example (yes, I saw this a few time...).

PyPi's format is *not* designed as a mean to ship source code, but as a
mean to ship *binary* (ie: food for pip). The fact that you're shipping
built docs shows exactly that.

BTW, pristine-tar is a broken concept. Anyone that pretends otherwise
really has no clue about how tarballs work, their internal timestamps
that needs to be removed, and the fact that one has to order files in a
certain way when adding them to the archive, otherwise everything is
completely broken. Did I mention it also depends on the implementation
of tar itself, that BSD people have a different one, and that Debian has
to carry patches to fix upstream issues that generate different tarballs
depending on the tar utility version? Not to mention also that the
original author of pristine-tar (Joey Hess) agrees with me...

So why should we even attempt to bother? That's additional pain that
you're asking for, when there's not even enough man power, and we're
probably even on the way to get OpenStack removed form Debian if the
situation doesn't change.