on quilt, dpkg, dgit and symlinks.

[peter green]

I recently discovered some unusual behaviour in a source package I was working on.

I was using some scripts I put together myself to generate patch series for a debian package.

dgit claimed I was creating a new symlink and that creation of a new symlink could not be represented by 3.0 (quilt). So I removed the symlink, dpkg-source called by dgit then warned about "deletion" of said symlink. Furthermore when I extracted the resulting source package the symlink reappeared.

After some tracking down it seems a patch *can* create a symlink and that both dpkg-source and "quilt push" will happily apply such a patch.

quilt pop on the other hand is not so happy. Sometimes it will remove the patch, sometimes it will complain that it "won't remove cleanly". I haven't figured out the exact trigger.

dgit will import a dsc with such a patch, then fail to build a source package from the tree it has just imported complaining about changes that cannot be represented by 3.0 (quilt).

not sure what to make of all this.

I have attached a source package demonstrating the issue (you will need to grab the orig tarball from the debian archive)


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: hello_2.10-1+symlink.debian.tar.xz
Type: application/x-xz
Size: 6408 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/vcs-pkg-discuss/attachments/20170310/b39c52fb/attachment-0001.bin>
-------------- next part --------------
Format: 3.0 (quilt)
Source: hello
Binary: hello
Architecture: any
Version: 2.10-1+symlink
Maintainer: Santiago Vila <sanvila at debian.org>
Homepage: http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/
Standards-Version: 3.9.6
Build-Depends: debhelper (>= 9.20120311)
Package-List:
 hello deb devel optional arch=any
Checksums-Sha1:
 f7bebf6f9c62a2295e889f66e05ce9bfaed9ace3 725946 hello_2.10.orig.tar.gz
 692a93f818ec349fbe130bfa3c6f5aff20b01e24 6408 hello_2.10-1+symlink.debian.tar.xz
Checksums-Sha256:
 31e066137a962676e89f69d1b65382de95a7ef7d914b8cb956f41ea72e0f516b 725946 hello_2.10.orig.tar.gz
 f8eb5f4161568f7e30874f12bf2d5262ec7cef8ce2eef8353a681a320a81d002 6408 hello_2.10-1+symlink.debian.tar.xz
Files:
 6cd0ffea3884a4e79330338dcc2987d6 725946 hello_2.10.orig.tar.gz
 3a0426222a13f7f40147fd865088f032 6408 hello_2.10-1+symlink.debian.tar.xz