Re: Gnulib in Debian

[Simon Josefsson via Gnulib discussion list <bug-gnulib@gnu.org>]

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Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org> writes:

> TLDR: FTP Master rejected my libpaper package because it contains gnulib
> source files. I pointed out that other Debian packages for which I am
> upstream do exactly this and have been accepted, and that it is the
> standard way to use gnulib. A few senior Debian Developers said they did
> not consider this use of gnulib to be against Debian policy. But FTP
> Master's stance appears to be that they will not let any new packages into
> the archive that contain gnulib sources (or in general, vendored
> sources—they don't have anything against gnulib in particular!). I also
> argued that building against Debian's version of gnulib would risk
> introducing bugs (I have found that updating gnulib in my projects can make
> previously-working code fail).

The last aspect should be solved: the latest gnulib in Debian contains a
git bundle of gnulib, so you can Build-Depends on gnulib and via
GNULIB_REVISION pick out exactly the gnulib git revision that libpaper
needs.  This avoids including gnulib files in the tarball that is
uploaded to Debian, and there is no risk that you will get gnulib code
from a different git commit.  It requires an added 'Build-Depends: git'
in libpaper, though, which is unfortunate but I don't see how to avoid
it.  I should write a post to debian-devel describing this pattern on
how to use gnulib in Debian packages, but you can infer everything from
the links given in my blog post [1] and the latest upload of libntlm
into Debian.

/Simon

[1] https://blog.josefsson.org/2024/04/13/reproducible-and-minimal-source-only-tarballs/
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/auth-team/libntlm/-/tree/master/debian

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