create orig.tar.gz from base branch?

Bug #2024971 reported by Richard Hansen
6
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
git-build-recipe
Triaged
Low
Unassigned

Bug Description

For a 3.0 (quilt) format package, git-build-recipe currently converts it to a native package (assuming --allow-fallback-to-native) when:
  * pristine-tar can't find the orig tarball, and
  * an upstream/* tag doesn't exist for the upstream version.
Shouldn't it instead use `git archive HEAD` to generate the orig tarball from the base branch?

Related branches

Richard Hansen (rhansen)
summary: - build orig.tar.gz from base branch if debian dir is from another branch
+ create orig.tar.gz from base branch?
description: updated
description: updated
description: updated
Guruprasad (lgp171188)
Changed in git-build-recipe:
status: New → Triaged
importance: Undecided → Low
Revision history for this message
Richard Hansen (rhansen) wrote (last edit ):

The reason I want this is to make it easier to automatically produce Emacs snapshots. The current debian packaging for Emacs parses debian/patches/*.patch to build a README: <https://git.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/emacs/tree/debian/rules?h=import/1%2528.2%2b1-15ubuntu1#n253>. The quilt-to-native conversion done by git-build-recipe breaks that logic.

As a workaround, I deleted the offending logic from debian/rules. However, I would prefer to keep the diff from Ubuntu's debian/ directory to my debian/ directory as small as possible.

Some other workarounds I haven't tried:
  * Duplicate the patches to another subdirectory inside debian/ and adjust paths in debian/rules. That would require manual intervention whenever the set of patches changes.
  * Add a pristine-tar branch or upstream/<version> tag with the contents of an arbitrary snapshot. The *.debian.tar.gz part of the source package would continue to grow unless I periodically refreshed the pristine-tar branch or upstream tag. The build might break if upstream deletes or renames a file because the *.debian.tar.gz cannot encode file deletions (except in patches). Also, the upstream portion of the package version would have to be fixed to something like `29~git`, otherwise git-build-recipe would be unable to find the upstream sources. (I think that's OK, but I'm not certain.)

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