Ian Jackson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said, regarding package diffs:
> Bill Mitchell writes ("Re: watch-1.0-2"): > > Gunzip will choke on a zero-length compressed file, so I've been > > gzipping a file which contains a single newline to provide a .diff.gz > > file in this situation (legally gzipped, and legally empty of diffs). > > Wibble. What's a wibble? > > Could whoever owns the packaging guidelines please clarify this? > > Is the .diff.gz file required, even if not strictly needed? > > No, it's not required (as you could tell from the dpkg release > announcements, for example). > > > Personally, I'd consider this a reasonable requirement, since lack of > > diffs tends to break things (e.g., Ian Jackson's recent proposal for a > > new packaging format). > > No, it doesn't break that either. *sigh* Sigh.... Ian's proposal (a good one, I thought) was: + I propose that the source package for `foo', version 1.2 revision 5, + would be a gzipped tarfile with the following structure: + + foo-1.2-5.debian-diff + foo-1.2.orig/foo.c + /foo.h + &c Unless it's absolutely clear that something is optional, code will be written which expects it to be present and fails if it's not found. That's why I've been uploading legal-but-empty compressed diffs. However, if they're optional, I'll omit that in future. > > If diffs are optional, I'll modify dchanges(1) to consider them optional. > > Please do so. OK.