> I almost hate to suggest this, as it has the potential for much
> evilness, but would it be possible to somehow mark diffs as specific
> to some arch only?
[...]
Having slept a night over the issue :-), I had a similar idea.
If Ian says the patch must be available also on the FTP site, not
(only) in the BTS, why not it put there in some way? My idea just
wasn't coupled to architectures, more to versions. I see several
possibilities:
- For each NMU, there's an additional patch file in the source
directory, e.g. foo_1.0-1.0.1.nmu that is PGP signed by the creator
and contians the patch for the bin-only NMU. foo's files could then
look like:
source/bar/foo_1.0.orig.tar.gz
source/bar/foo_1.0-1.diff.gz
source/bar/foo_1.0-1.dsc
source/bar/foo_1.0-1.0.1.nmu
binary-baz/bar/foo_1.0-1.deb
binary-mum/bar/foo_1.0-1.0.1.deb
Since .nmu files aren't .dsc files, they constitute no real new
source version, thus they don't force other archs to recompile the
package, too. But the patch is publically available.
I guess dinstall would have to be modified a bit to install .nmu
files, but I think this can't be very hard. And we'd need new
option to dpkg-genchanges, for example --nmu-path=FILE, that
PGP-signs the patch file, renames it and generates an entry in
Files: for it.
- The other possibility is to include the patch in the binary package
somehow, either in the control.tar.gz (not that easy to access...)
or under /usr/doc/PACKAGE in the data.tar.gz. But that would mean a
modification to dpkg-deb --build so that it can include the file
more or less automatically. Also, it's somewhat harder to pass
additional options to dpkg-deb --build, because it's args are
hardwired in debian/rules. Either we pass the info in an
environment variable, or dpkg-deb looks for specially named files
itself (e.g. ../nmu-patch*.diff{,.gz}).
> Unfortunately, this would require a reworking of several things,
> including ideally a specialized "porters' dpkg-buildpackage".
It needs no special version for porters, just a new version with a new
option.
Roman
