On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 10:07:54AM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
On Wed, 2008-09-10 at 10:26 +0100, Ross Paterson wrote:
So if Debian or Gentoo etc repackage one of these packages in their distributions, what is the pristine tarball that they use?
They use the one and only pristine tarball. As for what meta-data they choose, that's up to them, they have the choice of using the original .cabal file in the .tar.gz or taking advantage of the updated version.
Since the modified version may contain essential fixes, they'll almost certainly want that. And they'll want to keep their mods separate, so the updated .cabal file becomes another part of the upstream source, with secondary versioning. To which they add a third level of versioning for their distro packaging. And all this versioning is real; it's keeping track of significant changes at each stage. And then there's the psychological effect. Make it easier to clean up broken releases afterwards, and you'll have more of them.