On Tue, Aug 08, 2023 at 10:26:09AM +0200, Helmut Grohne wrote: > As a minor data point, I also do not rely on `debian/rules clean` to > work for reproducing the original source tree, because too many packages > fail it. > > Let me point out though that moving to git-based packaging is not the > property that is relevant here. I expect that most developers use either > sbuild or pbuilder for the majority of their builds. Both tools create a > .dsc, copy that .dsc into a chroot, unpack, build, and dispose of it. So > we effectively have at least three ways of cleaning source packages: > > a) `debian/rules clean` > b) Some VCS (and that's probably just git) > c) Copy the source before build and dispose the entire copy
For what it's worth, my packages are managed using git, and some times I'll use git-buildpackage (with sbuild as the backend), dgit (for releases to unstable; but for some reasons it mysteriously fails when doing uploads backports), as well as dpkg-buildpackage in the git repository. Because *do* run dpkg-buildpackage for my test builds, I actually have an incentive to make "./debian/rules clean" work correctly, because running dpkg-buildpackage leaves modified files all over the my repository's working directory, and it's *useful* that "debian/rules clean" gets my repository back to a clean state. I could do "git reset --hard", but sometimes I have locally modified files in working directory, and "git reset --hard" would blast all of that, where as "./debian/rules clean" does what I want. Cheers, - Ted