[trimming the CC a bit; Russ and Ian read -devel] Hello Jonathan, Andreas,
I don't think that what either of you have said is a response to the reasons that there were for removing this optional target from Policy. The thought driving this is that not every trick in a Debian package maintainer's toolbox should be detailed in Policy. What we want to write down here are techniques that apply to most packages, where the cases to which the techniques do not apply can be written down too. The problem with get-orig-source is that it is always an edge case. It's only needed when d/watch and Files-Excluded aren't sufficient, which already puts you out in the weeds, and it is going to need to work differently in every package that uses it. So it doesn't make sense to standardise it. However, the use cases that you raise are valid, and I agree with you that package maintainers should make it possible for users to extract the information that the two of you are trying to extract. They might do that by providing a rules target called get-orig-source, which is perfectly allowed. But that's now package-specific machinery. It seems that what you actually want is not a very loose and unhelpful get-orig-source convention, but a recommendation or requirement that package maintainers make it possible to obtain a list of the files that were excluded, or similar. Maintainers could fulfill that using Files-Excluded, a rules target, text in README.source, or whatever. If you think you know exactly what that recommendation or requirement should be, please file a new bug proposing its addition to Policy. That's something that it makes sense to standardise, unlike get-orig-source. On Tue, Jul 03 2018, Andreas Tille wrote: > Since this does not exist any more I'm afraid we will end up with more > upstream tarballs a third person will not have any clue how to fetch > the source. IMHO that's an unfortunate change in policy. I don't see why removing an /optional/ target, which you can still use if you want to, makes it likely we'll end up with more such source packages. The fact that the target isn't there won't make it much less likely someone will think, "I should ensure the tarball is fetchable." -- Sean Whitton
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