Hi Charles, Charles Plessy wrote: > Le Tue, Dec 08, 2009 at 05:36:54PM +0100, Damien Raude-Morvan a écrit :
>> As a general guideline, generated files should be stripped from "original" >> source tarballs. [...] > I personnally tend to prefer to keep the Debian ‘orig’ tarball identical to > the > upstream tarball as much as it is possible, so that by its MD5 sum it is > obvious that it is pristine. Thank you for bringing this up. I am not an ftpmaster, but maybe it would be helpful to mention some other reasons to keep the .orig.tar.gz pristine. By distributing the pristine source, we provide a service to the free software community outside of Debian. When upstreams silently disappear, distros take over as the main distribution point for their software. Similarly, sometimes the only place to find an older version of a package is in the various distros’ archives. Having to repack makes trouble for people trying to help package a new upstream version. A nice repacking script can help, but not by much. Any potential contributer still has to figure out how it works and make sure everything goes to plan. Ignoring the files or deleting them in the 'clean' target is much simpler. Often, files the buildds do not use can be helpful for other users. Configure scripts, source files generated by bison or web, and processed documentation often fall into this category. Patent- encumbered code can sometimes, too. On the other hand, some files in the upstream tarball really may be useless for everybody. This should be fixed upstream! Having to maintain a repacking script over several releases to work around such a simple problem is really not a good sign for a packager maintainer’s relationship with upstream. The second reason above is most important to me: it is really unpleasant to fight against repacking scripts. If the terms of redistribution make this trouble necessary, I grumble and bear it. The rest of the time, I would like to avoid it. Just my 2 cents. Jonathan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
