On 11 Jun 1999, Adam Di Carlo wrote: > Also, as discussed recently, recompressing upstream source is not > really enough justification for dirtying the upstream source.
I like to consider the source code (.c files, etc) and it's transfer encoding (.tar.gz) to be seperate. if you repack it, or recompress it, all you are doing is changing the way it is delivered not what is being delivered which is really what we want to preserve. The best reasons I've heard for not doing recompression (and/or conversion) boiled down two a handfull of things: - People want to be able to verify the original source via a digital signature and the author has only included signatures for his .tar.gz file - People want to be able to 'eyeball' the validity of a .tar.gz by checking something trivial like the size of the file against another FTP site Obviously recompression (and largely conversion) does not effect any other forms of comparision between archives so it is harmless. > Moreover, we see nothing in the Debian Policy stating that maintainers > *should* (not must) use upstream source when possible. I believe this > is an error. I think the reason for this is that dpkg-source cannot handle pristine source in all conditions. It seems to me that when we agreed on pristine source we all thought it was something else :< Jason
