Russell Stuart writes: > On Tue, 2019-04-30 at 09:25 +0800, Paul Wise wrote: >> I like this option because it still works well if we ever decide to >> fix a fundamental flaw in the Debian source package layout. > > I suspect whether that's a fundamentally is a matter or personal taste. > On this point my taste aligns with yours. > > I've used both rpm source format and the Debian one, and IMO the rpm > one is mostly better. The primary reason is the one you've mention > here: they maintain the separation between the source, rpm spec, and > build areas's far more cleanly than Debian does. This makes some > common flaws one often flaws in Debian packages just disappear: like > cleaning up the source directory after a build.
I also agree with this. It is also not only RPM, but for example also Gentoo, Arch and others which contain only the distro-specific parts in their repositories. This also makes things easier as developers do not have to know about branch management, merging, rebasing, ... to start with. Many people using Git don't know how to do this. As an example: to update to a new upstream release, I ideally just have to drop the new upstream tarball, update d/changelog and am done. Compare with [1] which is much more complicated, even ignoring the extra complexity using dgit adds compared to just using git. Ansgar [1] https://manpages.debian.org/stretch-backports/dgit/dgit-maint-merge.7.en.html#NEW_UPSTREAM_RELEASES