Hi Morten, you mail has not much to do on debian-policy. It rather concerns dpkg and dpkg-dev and as such I'm taking the discussion to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Fri, 05 Sep 2008, Morten Kjeldgaard wrote: > In the olden days (OK, I am guessing here) people used to hack away at > upstream's source directory, trusting that all changes were recorded in > the *.diff.gz file. The trend is now to have only debian/ present in > *.diff.gz, and with all the packager's modifcations in debian/patches/, > controlled by dpatch, quilt or some other system. > > I propose that this trend is made more explicit, The trend will already be made more explicit when we swicth to the new source package format "3.0 (quilt)". See dpkg-source's manual page for more details. > by adding to policy an optional file, debian/include, that explicitly > lists what files/ directories outside of debian/ should be included in > *.diff.gz. The format of that file should allow for comments explaining > why those particular parts are needed in the diff.gz. This can already be done at run-time with the -i option of dpkg-source. In the future, I'll probably give the possibility to provide default command-line options in the source package within the file debian/source/build-options but I haven't implemented this yet. > Why is this needed? Personally, I have met several situations where I > -- intentionally or not -- have dropped temporary files, scripts, notes > to myself, copies of source files, etc. in source directories which i > later to my dismay discover end up in the .diff.gz file. > > Also, if you for some reason need to re-run the GNU autotools, the whole > directory tree will contain Makefile.in's aclocal.m4 or other files > generated by that system, that you meticuously have to remove in the > clean target of debian/rules in order for the source package to build > properly and cleanly. > > The existence of an empty debian/include file -- or perhaps the absense > of the file -- would signal to the build system to ignore everything > outside of debian/ for inclusion in the *.diff.gz. If, for some reason, > you really want changes to the source tree, just name those files or > directories in debian/include. With the new format, if you have local changes, they will be integrated in the quilt serie as a new patch and the patch will be automatically named by dpkg-source. lintian will probably (one day) warn about such patches because when you modify the upstream sources, you must have a good reason to do it and thus you should be able to give a proper name to the patch and describe it instead of just letting dpkg-source record the change. Feel free to give a try to the new format and see if there are other things that can be improved to resolve your concerns. Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch : http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
