Hi Paul,
> Policy recommends it, that should be enough?
>
> http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-source.html#s-debianrules
tl;dr: is get-orig-source supposed to be a duplicate of uscan (d/watch) or
apt-get source? And why do we want to reimplement either? And why do we want
yet another location for the download URL in the packaging?
I'd personally say "get-orig-source (optional)" is quite different to "get-
orig-source (recommended)" but then the entire language of this part of
policy is loose at best.
There's plenty of discussion about what policy actually means here: which
version should be downloaded, exactly? -- the name "orig" seems to imply
getting the current source tarball, policy suggests it should get the latest
upstream release and many implementations differ from this. And of course
the maintainer is supposed to have a suitable crystal ball to know how to
repackage version N+1 when they package version N... because sites never
change their download URL and upstreams never add or remove crap from their
tarballs.
This has reached the point where there's a feeling that it would better to
remove this recommendation from policy altogether.
http://bugs.debian.org/466550
This bug isn't the first time it has been discussed, it's just the current
discussion in the BTS against d-policy. It will have its 6th birthday soon.
Given the lack of agreement about what get-orig-source should do, my feeling
is that it is heading even further into the "let's get rid of it" zone.
Having uscan call "debian/rules get-orig-source" is quite difficult to do in
a policy-compliant way (as already noted by Jakub) as the location for the
munged tarball is different. Having uscan call a debian/repack from d/watch
seems a little more sane only because there's no policy saying what d/repack
must do; having uscan do the repacking itself with something like Files-
Excluded from d/copyright is even nicer and devscripts in git can do this.
Like so many things in Debian there is more than one way to do something
that is truly simple and for which there probably should only be one way. It
would be nice if we didn't have more than one way of doing something as
simple as fetching an upstream source -- it's harder for automation, it's
harder for QA, it's harder for new maintainers and it's harder for casual
bug squashers. Without undertaking any sort of survey of packages, my
feeling is that the project is centralising on d/watch + uscan instead of
get-orig-source.
cheers
Stuart
--
Stuart Prescott http://www.nanonanonano.net/ stu...@nanonanonano.net
Debian Developer http://www.debian.org/ stu...@debian.org
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