Package: wnpp Severity: normal I am orphaning pristine-tar. Note that this is a native package, so it needs a new upstream maintainer in addition to Debian maintainer.
I have no personal need to use pristine-tar now that dgit exists, and I would rather spend time on dgit. I should add a little bit about the reason I wrote pristine-tar in the first place. There were two reasons: 1. I was once in a talk where someone mentioned that Ubuntu had/was developing something that involved regenerating orig tarballs from version control. I asked the obvious question: How could that possibly be done technically? The (slightly hung over) presenter did not have a satesfactory response, so my curiosity was piqued to find a way to do it. (I later heard that Ubuntu has been using pristine-tar..) 2. Sometimes code can be subversive. It can change people's perspective on a topic, nudging discourse in a different direction. It can even point out absurdities in the way things are done. I may or may not have accomplished the subversive part of my goals with pristine-tar. Code can also escape its original intention. Many current uses of pristine-tar fall into that category. So it seems likely that some people will want it to continue to work even if it's met the two goals above already. My feeling is that pristine-tar will eventually need to embed a suite of historical versions of tar and gzip (and bzip2 etc), since upstream changes can break output stability. It already embeds several versions of the compressors. We've slightly been abusing the Debian patches of tar to put in pristine-tar compatability hacks there, and while I appreciate Bdale's willingness to do that, I don't think that's sustainable. Anyone who wants to maintain this is going to need to tackle that issue. It's also helpful if you enjoy the interesting puzzle of taking a file it fails to support currently, and finding the trick to make it work. Without Faidon Liambotis, much of the hardest parts of pristine-tar (particularly pristine-gz) would not have happened. If Faidon wants this package, he has it. -- see shy jo
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