Dale Scheetz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > On Tue, 7 Jan 1997, Richard Jones wrote: > > > > > Hiya, i thought I saw someone mention that upgrades to existing > > packages were available via diffs to the source. Thus allowing the download > > of just the diff rather than the entire .orig source ( assuming of > > course you have the source to the original package online). Now I > > checked out the FAQ and a few other places and see no mention of this. > > If this feature is available can someone tell me where I can read about > > it, if it isn't is something like this (or perhaps even something > > similar to FreeBSD's CVS upgrade system) likely to become available? > > > First, let me make clear that we are not talking about upgrading binary > packages here. This is strictly a source packaging issue. >
Yup, that is understood. > That said, you are referring to the new source package format, which has > many nice features, most notably the one you referred to. > First, not all packages have been converted to the new source format, so > you will see some packages in the old format. (I am going to assume that > everyone knows how the old format worked) > > The new format consists of a source tree in package_xxx.orig.tar.gz that > unpacks into a source tree as nearly identical to that provided by the > upstream provider as is possible; a diff.gz file containing the > differences between this source and the debianized version of the tree; > and a "Debian Source Control" file .dsc that will tell the packaging tools > how to unpack the source file. > Yup, I think that maybe my original message wasn't too clear. What I was trying to get at was, when a new upstream release is made and this filters down the stream to a Debian package, will the Debian maintainer simply replace the old xxx.orig.tar.gz with the new upstream version and update the xxx.diff.gz file accordingly, or will a source patch be made available to update the old xxx.orig.tar.gz to the new upstream version (I know some upstream maintainers supply such patches , but by no means all). On most updated releases such a patch will be orders of magnitude smaller than a fresh version of the full upstream version. Once again I apologise if I'm stating/restating the obvious here. > If you have installed the dpkg and dpkg-dev packages, more recent that > 1.4.0 you will be able to unpack the source using these files with the > following command: > > dpkg-source -x package_xxxx.dsc > > in the directory containing the orig.tar.gz, diff, and dsc files. This > will generate a source tree you can build with: > > dpkg-buildpackage > Just out of interest is there something along the lines of dftp-source, or dpkg-source-ftp? Richard Jones -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
