Package: debian-policy Version: 3.9.1.0 Severity: wishlist tar-in-tar source packages, i.e. Debian source packages which contains upstream sources in compressed form and uncompress them on the fly during the build process, are a bit of a PITA. They are particularly so for tools who want to do source code analyses on the code shipped by debian (e.g. the recently started DACA project) but, more generally, violate a good faith assumption that "apt-get source" will deliver an unpacked source package where the user can grep through upstream source code.
I haven't conducted an analyses of the amount of tar-in-tar source packages in the Debian archive (sorry about that), but per folklore it seems that there are very few such packages remaining in the archive. I guess this is so because tar-in-tar was mostly used to circumvent the lack of support for non-gzip compression in source packages, feature which is now provided by 3.0 source formats. Considering all the above, it would be nice if policy could start to discourage tar-in-tar, at least with a "should" (not) requirement. A potentially appropriate place where to mention that seems to be §4.8 "Restrictions on objects in source packages". Thanks for considering and many thanks in advance, Cheers. PS en passant: appendix §C.3 seems to be out of date wrt source formats 3.0, but it's not normative, so it's not a big deal -- System Information: Debian Release: 6.0 APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=it_IT.utf8, LC_CTYPE=it_IT.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash debian-policy depends on no packages. debian-policy recommends no packages. Versions of packages debian-policy suggests: ii doc-base 0.9.5 utilities to manage online documen -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110117104949.20850.90034.reportbug@usha.takhisis.invalid
