On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 02:24:33PM +0100, Jeroen van Wolffelaar wrote: > On Thu, Dec 09, 2004 at 01:13:09PM +0000, Andreas Metzler wrote: > > It is a payoff, larger diff for less frequent orig.tar.gz uploads. Instead > > of uploading a 3MB mutt_1.5.6-20040915.orig.tar.gz the mutt maintainers can > > upload a 400KB mutt_1.5.6-20040915+1.diff.gz when updating to CVS 20040915. > > This bandwith consideration is nice, but IMHO in no way is anywhere near > as important as the property that you can find Debian-specific changes > in the .diff.gz, and upstream sources in the .orig.tar.gz. It's quite > difficult to find out what was changed in Debian and what's directly > from upstream CVS this way. .orig.tar.gz size only matters (marginally) > for mirrors and developers downloading mutt's sources. As bandwith & > diskspace is cheap compared to developer time, I think it's much more > important to keep the upstream/Debian specific separation that is > intended with .orig.tar.gz/.diff.gz.
I tend to agree for vanilla diff.gz files. A lot of packages are using patch systems these days, however, that provide alternative means to distinguish the origins of patches. The mutt package, for instance, separates them in upstream/patches, debian/patches etc. For my own packages, I usually add a "CVS" suffix to the patch name and a note to the comment section. Which should be clear enough for anyone looking at the package source, and keeps the orig.tar.gz always at a released upstream version. Regards, Daniel.
