tarball-in-tarball packaging

[Colin Watson]

On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 12:09:59PM +0900, Emmet Hikory wrote:
>     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.

Indeed, this goes for packaging systems in general. It is very rarely
appropriate, for example, to convert a package in Ubuntu to use a
different set of helper tools from what it uses in Debian. (I have seen
one or two cases where it made sense, but if you're in such a position
then you probably don't need my advice anyway!)

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]