Please omit the debian/ directory from release tarballs

[Fabian Greffrath]

Hi xvid-devel,

although xvid is currently not in the official Debian archive (it 
awaits its approval in the NEW queue for more than 9 months now [1]) 
the package is actively maintained by the Debian pkg-multimedia team 
in the Debian git repository, see [2].

Our packaging in the debian/ directory has been vastly improved and is 
continuously adapted to Debian packaging standards. However, this 
cannot be said about the debian/ directory that is shipped in the xvid 
release tarballs. While it is still sufficient to build and test 
Debian packages with it, Debian's package quality checking tool 
"lintian" goes postal on it [3].

In order to maintain the package in Debian's git archive with our 
debian/ directory, we currently import the xvid release tarballs 
without their debian/ directory. Since this is cumbersome and 
error-prone, we would like to ask you to drop the debian/ directory 
altogether from the release tarballs. Advanced users who might want to 
build and test Debian packages from other sources but ours could then 
still checkout an SVN snapshot of xvid and do as they prefer.

Best Regards,
Fabian Greffrath

[1] http://ftp-master.debian.org/new.html
[2] http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-multimedia/xvidcore.git;a=summary
[3]
I: xvidcore source: binary-control-field-duplicates-source field 
"section" in package libxvidcore4
I: xvidcore source: missing-debian-source-format
W: xvidcore source: changelog-should-mention-nmu
W: xvidcore source: source-nmu-has-incorrect-version-number 1.3.1-1
W: xvidcore source: debhelper-but-no-misc-depends libxvidcore4-dev
W: xvidcore source: debhelper-but-no-misc-depends libxvidcore4
W: xvidcore source: ancient-standards-version 3.5.8 (current is 3.9.1)
W: xvidcore source: native-package-with-dash-version
E: xvidcore source: ancient-autotools-helper-file 
build/generic/config.sub 2003-06-18
E: xvidcore source: ancient-autotools-helper-file 
build/generic/config.guess 2003-06-17
P: libxvidcore4: no-homepage-field
W: libxvidcore4: copyright-without-copyright-notice
E: libxvidcore4: shlib-with-non-pic-code usr/lib/libxvidcore.so.4.3
I: libxvidcore4: no-symbols-control-file usr/lib/libxvidcore.so.4.3
I: libxvidcore4-dev: extended-description-is-probably-too-short
P: libxvidcore4-dev: no-homepage-field
W: libxvidcore4-dev: copyright-without-copyright-notice