Bug#677270: devscripts: Please provide a standard way of repacking upstream tarballs

[Nicholas Bamber]

Package: devscripts
Version: 2.11.8
Severity: wishlist

Dear Maintainer,
*** Please consider answering these questions, where appropriate ***

   * What led up to the situation?
For some time the Debian Perl Group has maintained a tool, called repack.sh
and documented at http://pkg-perl.alioth.debian.org/howto/repacking.html, for
repacking upstream tarballs. In its way it is quite powerful as it is driven by
a shell script fragment, debian/repack.local. Typically in the Perl world this is
used to remove the offending file and remove the corresponding line from the
MANIFEST file. I have also seen it used to extract a tarball that was packed inside 
a tarball (as well as removing the non-DFSG material). 

However as Debian Perl Group members have broadened their interests the tool has been
used in many packages beyond the the Perl Group.

I see dangers, both in Debian not having a standard way of repacking upstream tarballs
and people using the Perl groups tool without it becoming official. These dangers are made
potentially release critical, since when repacking goes wrong non-DFSG material could,
and temporarily has, leaked into the main archive. Firstly in not having a standard solution
mainatainers are forced to roll their own. In the case of mysql recently the repacking,
although in plain view in the debian/rules file, was not in anyway actually documented, whether
in the version number, debian/copyright, debian/watch, debian/rules or debian/README.source.
Neither of the maintainers were aware that the get-orig-source rule was repacking. 
And in the 5.5.23 such material did leak into the main archive temporarily.

Secondly if the Debian Perl Groups's tool is adopted, then its current practice is 
to rely on the repack.sh script being in the user's PATH. As the tool spreads further
beyond the Debian Perl Group this is likely to become more and more of an issue. It is 
not formally packaged anywhere.

   * What outcome did you expect instead?
I would like someone from the devscripts maintainers to adopt the tool and do whatever might 
be needed to make it suitable for inclusion in devscripts. The documentation is availavble at
http://pkg-perl.alioth.debian.org/howto/repacking.html. The code is available at 
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=pkg-perl/scripts.git;a=blob_plain;f=repack.sh;hb=HEAD
version=3 .

-- Package-specific info:

--- /etc/devscripts.conf ---

--- ~/.devscripts ---
Not present

-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages devscripts depends on:
ii  dpkg-dev   1.16.1.2
ii  libc6      2.13-32
ii  perl       5.14.2-11
ii  python     2.7.2-10
ii  python2.6  2.6.7-4
ii  python2.7  2.7.3~rc2-2.1

Versions of packages devscripts recommends:
ii  at                        <none>
ii  curl                      7.26.0-1
ii  dctrl-tools               2.22.1
ii  debian-keyring            2012.02.22
ii  dput                      0.9.6.3
ii  equivs                    2.0.9
ii  fakeroot                  1.18.3-1
ii  gnupg                     1.4.12-4
ii  libcrypt-ssleay-perl      0.58-1
ii  libdistro-info-perl       <none>
ii  libjson-perl              2.53-1
ii  libparse-debcontrol-perl  2.005-2
ii  libsoap-lite-perl         0.714-1
ii  liburi-perl               1.60-1
ii  libwww-perl               6.04-1
ii  lintian                   2.5.7
ii  man-db                    2.5.7-8
ii  patch                     2.6.1-3
ii  patchutils                0.3.2-1.1
ii  python-debian             0.1.21
ii  python-magic              <none>
ii  sensible-utils            0.0.7
ii  strace                    4.5.20-2.3
ii  unzip                     6.0-6
ii  wdiff                     1.1.1-1
ii  wget                      1.13.4-3
ii  xz-utils                  5.1.1alpha+20110809-3

Versions of packages devscripts suggests:
ii  bsd-mailx [mailx]            8.1.2-0.20111106cvs-1
ii  build-essential              11.5
ii  cvs-buildpackage             <none>
ii  devscripts-el                <none>
ii  gnuplot                      <none>
ii  libauthen-sasl-perl          <none>
ii  libfile-desktopentry-perl    <none>
ii  libnet-smtp-ssl-perl         <none>
ii  libterm-size-perl            <none>
ii  libtimedate-perl             1.2000-1
ii  libyaml-syck-perl            <none>
ii  mutt                         1.5.21-5
ii  openssh-client [ssh-client]  1:6.0p1-1
ii  svn-buildpackage             0.8.4
ii  w3m                          0.5.3-8

-- no debconf information