On Mon, 18 Aug 2014, Don Armstrong wrote: > On Mon, 18 Aug 2014, Thorsten Glaser wrote: > > This does not work in Debian: you always need the .orig.tar.* file, > > at least for the upload, for non-native packages. > > You need it from somewhere, but the whole point of pristine-tar is that > you can generate the orig.tar.* from information in the git repository.
pristine-tar information bitrots. As long as you *know* this and prepare for it, that's not a problem. Arguably, pristine-tar needs to do a much better job of disclosing its shortcomings in the documentation and of marketing itself as a simple convenience tool: you must not depend on it being able to re-create the orig tarballs at some unspecified time in the future. The information pristine-tar stores bitrots when tar/gzip/xz/bzip2 changes output even slightly, because the stored deltas become useless. To work around this, you need to add a way for pristine-tar/gz/xz/bzip2... to duplicate the exact behaviour of past versions of these tools. It also bitrots when the user does any sort of edition to the tarball-base branch it uses to generate the approximate tarbal: pristine-tar stores references to the git commits it needs inside a ".id" file, instead of using something git actually knows about. This can be fixed by storing the "base tarball commit" information needed by pristine-tar in a way git itself is aware of. Since it needs to be push/fetch-safe, it will have to be done either as visible special branch (e.g. as done by stgit) or by abusing multi-parent (merge) commits. private refs won't work well for this. It is easy to deal with the two failure scenarios above, as long as you are aware they could happen. -- "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot Henrique Holschuh -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140818173013.ga27...@khazad-dum.debian.net
