Before we get bogged down into the details of exactly what script should do what, &c, we need to consider what our requirements are, and make some overall design decisions. I think we have several conflicting requirements.
1. It is important to have a single file that can be downloaded and then unpacked using a single command to produce the Debianised source. This will make it much easier to build packages from source. 2. It would also be good to have the same thing as above, but to produce the upstream source. 2a. That upstream source should be unmodified. 3. All of the ways of unpacking our source packages should unpack into a subdirectory, and there should be a consistent naming scheme for those subdirectories. 4. We might need to support patches for different architectures (but I'd be inclined to say that this ought to be the job of the debian.rules). 5. People may want to build from our source tree on odd systems which lack some of our package management tools. 6a. The package maintainer should not have to download and upload more stuff than is necessary. 6b. Disk usage at the distribution site should be no larger than necessary. 7. Unpacking a source package should not require one to execute parts of it (ie, source packages should contain only data, not code used during the extraction). This is important for security reasons. 8. We need to be able to rebuild our source package(s) from unpacked tree(s) in some reasonably sane way. Requirements 2a and 3 are clearly in conflict. Requirements 1 and 5 together imply that we need a tarfile or something similar containing the Debianised source and requirements 2 and 5 say we should have a tarfile containing the original source but requirements 6a and 6b each say we should only have one tarfile. As far as I can see we have one important choice to make before we consider any details: do we go for some kind of `proprietary' format, intended to be manipulable with our tools, which will enable us to satisfy 1, 2, 4 and 6 easily, or do we go for some straightforward combination of tarfiles and things, which can be manipulated by scripts or by hand on any sane Unix system, satisfying any two of 1, 2 and 6, and eaily satisfying 5 and 7 ? 3 and 8 involve the writing of more code if we use a proprietary format, I think. Ian.
