Bernhard Voelker wrote:
> Shipping a tarball with local changes which are not committed and pushed
> is ... yes, dirty work.
No, it isn't.
1) Most distributions do that. For example, coreutils in Debian has 3 patches
[1].
2) Making modifications is the essence of Free Software.
`who --version` in Debian reports "who (GNU coreutils) 9.1". Should it report
"9.1-dirty" instead of "9.1"? I don't think the Debian developers would find
it socially acceptable to call most of their packages "dirty". And likewise
for other distros.
> ... the state of
> the local working tree: in such a status, one cannot produce a neat and clean
> release package (or executable as intermediate build result) in the sense
> that it could be released properly to the public.
Well, what most distros do — to release patched versions to the public —
proves that this statement is incorrect.
> In contrast, "-modified" does not tell that much. Modified compared to what?
Compared to upstream, of course. What else?
Bruno
[1] https://sources.debian.org/patches/coreutils/9.1-1/
