Rogério Brito wrote: > It seems to me that its main purpose is to retain metadata that aren't > kept when files are put in a git repository. But the long description > describes too much *how* pristine-tar does, but not *what* problem it > addresses.
The man page seems completly clear to me WRT the problem addressed: pristine-tar can regenerate a pristine upstream tarball using only a small binary delta file and a revision control checkout of the upstream branch. The delta file is designed to be checked into revision control along-side the upstream branch, thus allowing Debian packages to be built entirely using sources in revision control, without the need to keep copies of upstream tarballs. Thus, the problem addressed is recovering an original, pristine upstream tarball from other available information without keeping an archive of such tarballs. > I suggest, thus, something along the lines: > > ,---- > | In some cases, files created by the user may not retain their metadata > | (e.g., information like file permission, including owner and > | time-stamps), which may be needed for recreation of archives (like > | tarballs) and/or checksums that take the metadata into consideration. But this doesn't explain what pristine-tar does, it instead describes (not very accurately) the mechanics of how it does it. It seems to me that what may actually be confusing you is not the purpose of pristine-tar, but why it is needed to generate a bit-identical upstream tarball from a source tree of files. -- see shy jo
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