Hi, Sean Whitton wrote: > On Wed, Apr 11 2018, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> I'm pretty reluctant to specify this sort of optional target that >> works differently in every package that uses it back in Policy because >> it's really not standardized, nor do I think it's possible to >> standardize. If we really want to write something down about the >> target, maybe the Developer's Reference would be a better spot? There >> were a whole host of issues with having this in Policy that were >> resolved by moving it outside the scope of Policy, such as how to >> document dependencies required for running the get-orig-source target. > > The Developer's Reference seems like a more appropriate place for a > convention that it is not possible to specify precisely. I'm a bit confused: wasn't it already specified pretty precisely? I would be in favor of adding the target back, with a description along the lines of "If you provide a get-orig-source target, it should satisfy <this interface>. If you provide neither a get-orig-source target nor a debian/watch file and you do not use an archive from upstream as-is, please include clear instructions in README.source to allow a human to produce an upstream tarball." Context: I have run into a few packages that used the +dfsg convention without documenting what they removed from the tarball and I was not able to locally update them. :( Thanks, Jonathan
