Hi Tino, On Tue, Dec 09, 2014 at 10:45:15AM +0100, Tino Mettler wrote: > Package: gitpkg > Version: 0.26 > Severity: normal > Tags: patch > > Hi, > > the patches generated by quilt-patches-deb-export-hook contain a signature. > The default signature contains the git version number. Therefore, each time > a different git version is used, the signature in all patches differs and > causes unrelated noise in the debdiff. > > I don't know if there is a real use for the signature, so I'd propose to > just disable it during patch generation. A more advanced behaviour could be > to check if the user set a non-default signature and enable it only in this > case.
Yeah, my first thought here is that the signature really doesn't add anything of particular value for this use case (and even if the patch file was forwarded upstream and applied, the signature would be ignored when it is applied too), so the change you've proposed seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. That said though, if someone did have a reason to want to explicitly set it to something of their own, they might not be happy with us for just stomping it out. Since I can't think of a reason I'd want to do that, it's a bit hard to second-guess someone who would :) One thing that did come up in discussion recently was a maintainer who liked to make their packaging work GPL-3+, even when that was otherwise incompatible with the licence of the upstream source. They claimed that if they had patches to upstream, then they explicitly licenced those differently to debian/* to use the upstream licence ... So I guess you could use format.signature to automatically add a rider like that -- though it would be a little fragile for anyone doing an export where that wasn't set, so I'm not sure I'd really recommend it. Given that it's fairly trivial for us to check if format.signature or format.signaturefile is set though, respecting them if they are seems like a worthwhile thing to do to leave the choice in the user's hands. The new git-debcherry option for exporting quilt patches will need to be updated for this too (I can take care of doing all that). We're probably too deep in the freeze to get this in for Jessie now (given it doesn't really break anything, it just makes noisy diffs) but I'll get this in once it's released. If anyone wants a trivial workaround in the meantime, setting format.signature to an empty string should do the same thing as the patch here does. Thanks! Ron -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
