Re: diffs for .debs

[Paul Seelig <pseelig mail Uni-Mainz de>]

martin@home-of-linux.org (Martin Baulig) writes:

> Sarel Botha <sjb@dundee.lia.net> writes:
> 
> > Can anyone tell me where I can find the .diffs used to create the .debs of the
> > gnome source packages?
> 
> Well, I'm not that familar with debian, but AFAIK the debian people did not
> commit them to cvs (the debian/ directories in some modules), you you need
> to fetch the source .deb and extract it from there 
>
There are no source .deb's like Redhat does with their .rpm's.  Debian
distributes pristine sources in .tar.gz (but renamed to .orig.tar.gz)
and a separate .diff.gz containing Debian specific patches for the
packaging related stuff and fixes.  There is a third file with an .dsc
ending which contains md5sum and size of both the tar ball and the
diff file, which is used by dpkg-source to unpack and patch the
pristine sources.  This is IMHO a far cleaner approach to distributing
sources than the rpm way.

> (hmm, I already did this
> one time ... think there's a directory somewhere on the debian ftp containing
> both tarballs and patches).
>
There is a source directory tree ordered the same way like the binary
trees (i386/sparc/alpha/powerpc/hurd) at every Debian FTP site or
mirror.
                                   Cheers, P. *8^)
-- 
   --------- Paul Seelig <pseelig@goofy.zdv.uni-mainz.de> -----------
   African Music Archive - Institute for Ethnology and Africa Studies
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