[request-tracker-maintainers] include debian/ in upstream?

[Niko Tyni]

On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 11:43:25AM +0200, Toni Mueller wrote:

> Jesse Vincent, upstream of RT, suggested incorporating the debian/
> directory directly in upstream:
> 
> "When you're happy with the packaging, would it make sense for me to
> check a copy of the debian/ directory into the RT subversion
> repository?"
> 
> Any opinions?

Hi,

there has been some discussion about this on debian-mentors [1,2],
and debian-devel [3].

Personally, I think distributing debian/ in the upstream tarball does
more harm than good.

For one, as we're doing dpatch-style packaging, the differences to the
upstream source in debian/patches become hidden in the upstream source
itself rather than the .diff.gz.

For another, the .diff.gz can't delete files, so there's a real chance
of conflict when changing the packaging. This can be worked around by
removing files from debian/rules, but that's extra work and can make
things quite confusing.

One more issue, although admittedly a minor one, is that the debian/
dir will never be up to date in a released tarball anyway, since whenever
one is released a new debian version should follow.

Having debian/ in the upstream SVN but not including it in the release
tarball would be fine by me, though.

[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2005/04/msg00158.html
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-mentors/2003/02/msg00134.html
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/02/msg00503.html

Cheers,
-- 
Niko