[Debian-on-mobile-maintainers] hexagon-dsp-binaries for DebianOnMobile

[Arnaud Ferraris]

Hi Robie,

Le 23/04/2026 à 10:59, Robie Basak a écrit :
> Hi Arnaud,
> 
> Thank you for accepting us into the team!

My pleasure, happy to have Qualcomm people on board :)

> hexagon-dsp-binaries is modelled on firmware-nonfree, which looks like
> it doesn't use pristine-tar either. A couple of difference from other
> packaging:
> 
>   * They're (non-free-firmware) binary blobs, not useful source that
>     users could modify.
>   * We'd be checking in these binary blobs to the upstream branch rather
>     than the normal expectation of the source tree being in there.
>   * They're very large, so pristine-tar and upstream branches would be
>     very large. git will cope, but I think it may become unnecessarily
>     painful to handle, and I'm not sure who would actually access these
>     in practice to make it worth the pain.
> 
> Given the above, I'm not sure of the value of managing it this way. For
> similar reasons it has a debian/ directory only git tree. I think
> firmware-nonfree is an example of the same (unusual) circumstances
> resulting in the choice to not keep the upstream "sources" in git.
> 
> `uscan --download-current-version` does work (note that repacking is
> active via Files-Included/Excluded) and in the worst case scenario,
> sorignapshot.debian.org does keep the repacked orig tarballs around for
> us.
> 
> We _could_ keep an upstream branch, tags, and pristine-tar updated, so
> this isn't a blocker or anything. I'm just not sure that there's value
> in it, unlike normal packages.

Thanks for clarifying. I was already under the impression that having 
the full upstream tags/branches wouldn't add much here (except eat git 
storage for breakfast), so that's confirmed.

Regarding pristine-tar vs uscan, I have mixed feelings: sure, uscan 
works, unless there's a remote server outage (very rare, granted) or 
you're on a plane with only a local git checkout on hand (yeah, playing 
the devil's advocate here).

On the other hand, this uses storage space too (although significantly 
less as IIRC it only stores deltas, not full archives) and the use-cases 
I mentioned above are not exactly bound to happen often.

> Do you think an exception to normal practice is warranted in this case?

I'll leave that up to you: I'm personally more comfortable with 
pristine-tar, but as I'm not actually involved in maintaining this 
package I can live with it being an exception :)

Cheers,
Arnaud

> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Robie

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