Guillem Jover writes ("Re: dpkg-source and gitish patches"):
> Hi!
>
> [lots of stuff]
Thanks for your explanations, which are very helpful.
> Maybe that was the wrong choice, and I should probably have brought this
> up on the list for wider comment. If people consider this is the case,
> I'm open to reverse course after a careful analysis of the current
> situation in stable/testing/unstable, etc. But while I'll be happy to
> handle the dpkg side, I don't think I can push any other part of such
> “major” transition right now.
Mmm, I can quite see why you would be cautious about that now.
> For the more generic case, we might want to make dpkg-source record
> such features that it can detect in a new field in the .dsc. Of course
> that covers only things that we are aware of beforehand. That's also
> one of the reason I've been trying lately to make the dpkg suite in
> general more strict in what it accepts, because otherwise we get this
> kind of thing slipping under our radar. :/
I think being stricter would be a very good idea.
> > Having said all that:
> >
> > Now that are relying on gitish diffs, are there any plans to make
> > dpkg-source able to represent binary diffs, and file removals ?
>
> Given that we have bitten the bullet on this (at least for now), I
> was intending to bring up supporting git-style diffs natively in
> dpkg-source, I've just not had the time to get to it yet. If you'd
> like to work on that, that would be great.
You mean, to have dpkg-source apply diffs itself, rather than relying
on patch ?
> Unfortunately last time I checked on this (see below), I realized that
> the git binary diff format is not documented anywhere, so ISTM this
> would need to be requested first to git upstream.
Err ... right.
> > (This is an alternative to my rsync proposal, which I have sadly put
> > on the back burner as it seems quite complicated to do all the things
> > everyone wants before it could be accepted. I still think `3.0
> > (rsync)' would be a good format - and it would suffer from fewer
> > compatibility problems, and fewer risks from immaturity of
> > dependencies, than `3.0 (quilt) [gitish]')
>
> (I've also got a half-finished draft reply to that, which I'd like
> get the time to send out, at least to clarify my position on it.)
Please do.
Ian.
