[Pkg-octave-devel] Concurrent maintenance of the Octave packaging

Christian T. Steigies cts at debian.org
Wed Oct 5 22:20:05 UTC 2011


On Wed, Oct 05, 2011 at 11:26:33PM +0200, Sébastien Villemot wrote:
> Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <jordigh at octave.org> writes:
> 
> > I know that the usual Debian practice is to strip the debian/
> > directory if a source tarball contains it, but that's usually because
> > there isn't very good communication between Debian and upstream. Now
> > that we're actually moving towards keeping the tarball source with the
> > Debian packaging, perhaps this can be an overall good move? This
> > should ease the burden of packaging if it's shared between Octave and
> > Debian developers.
> 
> Assuming that this workflow is desirable in terms of task sharing
> between developers (which is not obvious to me), I don't see how we can
> implement this in an elegant way.
> 
> For example, suppose that we have created the official Debian package
> using the debian/ dir of the upstream tarball as you suggest, and that
> later we need to change the packaging before a new upstream release
> happens (there are many reasons why we may need to do so), then:
> 
> - either our package is of the "3.0 (native)" kind, and we need to
>   create an artificial upstream number and an artificial upstream
>   tarball containing the required changes;
> 
> - or our package is of the "3.0 (quilt)" and then dpkg-source erases the
>   debian/ dir of the upstream tarball when uncompressing the source. So
>   we have to provide another (possibly modified) version of upstream
>   debian/ dir in the debian.tar.gz.
> 
> Both ways seem very clumsy to me.

I thought it was recommended NOT to include the debian directory upstream,
since it causes all kinds of problems (new upstream version required if
there is a mistake in the Debian package or the policy changes yet again)

http://kitenet.net/~joey/blog/entry/on_debian_directories_in_upstream_tarballs/

But if I understand this correctly, these problems are now solved:

 http://wiki.debian.org/Projects/DebSrc3.0
 Advantages of new formats

 You don't have to repack the upstream tarball to strip the debian
 directory. (The debian directory is automatically replaced by the content of
 the  .debian.tar.{gz,bz2,lzma,xz}  file at unpack time) 

So upstream could include a "basic" debian directory which allows everybody
to easily rebuild the package, but the "Debian" debian directory would be
completely independent of this. It could be synchronized with upstream, it
would probably have to be maintained in a separate repository to preserve
the changelog history, so it would only use some extra space. Not a big
drawback, but also not a big win, IMHO.

Christian



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