Comments regarding pyviennacl_1.0.1-1_amd64.changes

[Toby St Clere Smithe]

Hi Thorsten,

Thorsten Alteholz <alteholz at debian.org> writes:
> On Mon, 5 May 2014, Toby St Clere Smithe wrote:
>> Since the source package is built directly from these upstream sources
>> (no need to repackage, because the copyright situation is OK),
>
> but in [1] there are other reasons mentioned to repackage.
> Removing 4200 files out of 4300 seems to be a good point for repacking, doesn't it?
> And with this "newly" introduced handling via debian/copyright, it
> should not be that complex.

I know you have the final say here, but the same document[1], under
seciont 6.7.8.2 point 3 makes the converse point that the orig tarball
"should, except where impossible for legal reasons, preserve the entire
building and portablility infrastructure provided by the upstream
author. For example, it is not a sufficient reason for omitting a file
that it is used only when building on MS-DOS."

The rationale given is that it "is common for Debian users who need to
build software for non-Debian platforms to fetch the source from a
Debian mirror rather than trying to locate a canonical upstream
distribution point", which I agree with!

I'm not sure if the large number of files over-rides this point, but I'm
not sure the effort is worth it in any case: the boost files are small
(totalling only 38MB uncompressed, with a big compression ratio so that
any bandwidth used by the tarball is a fraction of that) and kept in a
self-contained subdirectory. Removing them would also complicate the
git-buildpackage workflow that I (and any co-maintainers) use, and of
course would mean maintaining a special get-orig-source rule, none of
which is strictly necessary.

But, of course, if you think it is imperative that they are removed,
then I shall do so!

[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/developers-reference/best-pkging-practices.html#repackagedorigtargz


Best regards,

-- 
Toby St Clere Smithe
http://tsmithe.net