tarball-in-tarball packaging

[Emmet Hikory]

Fellow Developers,
    I am sure that some of you like tarball-in-tarball packaging, and
that others of you dislike it.  Some of you may have no special
preference  I've seen discussions where strong arguments were presented
for doing it each way, and have built my own set of personal preferences
on the matter.

    On this contentious topic, I'd like to ask that one thing *never* be
done in this area: if you are updating to a new upstream of a package
that is present in Debian, and  not yet updated, please never alter the
previous choice of whether to use tarball-in-tarball or not.  If the
package is orphaned, and you *really* want to change whether it uses
tarball-in-tarball, please contact the Debian QA team to get the update
in Debian.  If there is an active maintainer, please defer to their
wishes.  Not doing so makes it impossible to achieve sync within that
upstream version, and will complicate any merging process.

    Please consider that those later working on a package may not share
your preference strongly enough to find working around such adjustments
an acceptable cost for having had the package in the "right" state.

    Thank you.

-- 
Emmet HIKORY