Bug#1017891: Ships autogenerated files that can't be renegerated with the code in Debian main

[Sebastian Dröge]

Source: vala
Version: 0.56.2-1
Severity: serious
Tags: upstream

Hi,

See the discussion on the Debian Rust maintainers list for background:
https://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/pkg-rust-maintainers/2022-August/022857.html

While that discussion is about Rust packages that were rejected, the same
situation also applies to Vala unfortunately. For more details how to solve
this in a way that makes ftp-masters happy, please refer to them.


The whole vapi subdirectory of the source package currently contains
autogenerated files for which the original source is not available in Debian.

Some examples for this are

  - gstreamer-audio-1.0.vapi: This was generated from the gir file of the
    corresponding library. While the library does exist in Debian and also the
    gir file (libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev), the same version does not
    exist and regenerating it from the version in Debian will introduce
    changes due to being older.

    As of 0.56.2 the file was generated from an unspecified git snapshot after
    the last GStreamer release, see
      https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vala/-/commit/6d80e07996834ace2a8d0f994913bc9cc623ec9b

  - gnet-2.0.vapi: The corresponding library does not even exist in Debian.

This is not a full list. You'll have to check one by one for all of these
autogenerated files and provide the original source in the correct version, or
ideally regenerate the files based on the source code in Debian on every
build.

>From my understanding, regenerating the files with whatever version is
available in Debian at build time is not an option if you don't want to lose
upstream support for any vapi-related bugs.

These files are also included in binary packages.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: bookworm/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (700, 'unstable'), (500, 'unstable-debug'), (100, 'experimental'), (1, 'experimental-debug')
merged-usr: no
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 5.18.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled