On Fri, 06 Jul 2018 at 08:16:12 +0200, Andreas Tille wrote: > Just yesterday > I had an example where the upstream download archive is lacking some > files from upstream SVN which need to be merged in to enable building > the software[1].
This often happens in Autotools packages whose upstream developer works from git, produces (but does not use) dist tarballs, and does not use `make distcheck`. You don't particularly need to repack the orig tarball for this: what I normally do is to put the missing file in `debian/dist` and copy it into place during the build. The only times repacking the orig tarball is required are: - there is non-distributable content in it - there is non-free content in it (and it isn't in the non-free component) - it isn't available in a format supported by dpkg (with the extreme case of this being that there is no orig tarball at all, only a VCS repository) You might also choose to repack it if there's enough free-but-unnecessary content to be a practical problem, either because it would require you to put an impractical amount of missing source code in debian/missing-sources or just because it's very large. smcv