On 21-Feb-2008, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > the question now is whether this directive actually makes sense as > policy at this point. It obviously does not reflect common > practice, since the common practice is not to implement this > target.
Practice is, I think, changing recently in response to the flowering of distributed VCSen. Increasingly many packages are now available from upstream *only* as a VCS branch; no static tarball releases are available. Yet we must provide a “pristine upstream tarball” for a Debian source package. Common practice is to ignore the issue, until someone points out that Lintian is complaining the package has no ‘debian/watch’ file. Then the maintainer commonly writes a ‘debian/watch’ file with a static comment saying “we get the upstream source from such-and-so VCS URL”. That satisfies Lintian, but the user is left floundering with figuring out exactly how to get the corresponding source from upstream to verify Debian's package. That is a poor substitute for a documented, automated method of getting a “pristine upstream tarball” of the exact VCS revision from which the source package was created. I think the ‘get-orig-source’ target is perfectly positioned to be that method in the short term. All we need is to re-vamp the specification so it means what many in this discussion want it to mean. (good sigmonster, have a cookie) -- \ “That's all very good in practice, but how does it work in | `\ *theory*?” —anonymous | _o__) | Ben Finney <b...@benfinney.id.au>
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