Michael Alan Dorman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > I'll go further and say that I think that any approach that does not > include as one of its goals the ability to work with totally virgin source > archives is a total waste of time because it doesn't buy us enough to ^^^^^^^^ > justify the work. > > So if we start from the assumption that we will have a separate, totally > unmodified source .tar.gz, that means we will have at a minimum two files.
If we're starting with the assumption that we're working with the actual upstream source archives, as opposed to a source archive possibly created by having the upstream archive unpacked and repacked without modification, we're not justified in asssuming that we have a .tar.gz upstream archive to work with. At least one, perhaps several, of my packages come as .zip files from upstream. At one time, I had (and may still have) packages which came packaged from upstream as sharfiles. > So, what can we have that other file to be? If we concede that the upstream sources might be unpacked and then repacked without modification, it's not a big step to say that they're not repacked into a vanilla .tar.gz file but instead into some other format -- probably a .<whatever> archive which contains the upstream sources as a .tar.gz file, debianizing diffs as a .diff.gz file, and probably some other items as well. So, we don't have to have an "other" file. > I would propose that it be a script (humanly readable, though it doesn't > have to be the prettiest thing around) that knows how to create a > directory, unpack the virgin sources into that directory, and then patch > the sources from patches included in its body. This script might be in the archive instead of the .diff.gz file, or in addition to it, or might be a new debain tool expected to be already present on the system, or ... > Seems to me that this doesn't have to be particularly hard, so I must be > missing something, right? It's like driving from my location in the Seattle suburbs to the Space Needle. It's not difficult, but there's a lot of ways it could be done and some particular way needs to be chosen.
