Hi, I am having a little dispute with another developer about the orig.tar.gz file. As I understand (or probably read somewhere) the upstream source, which ends up as <package>_<version>.orig.tar.gz should be _the_ source from the upstream author, no changes allowed (only under certain circumstances, like completely unsusable as it is, contains too many binaries, non-free stuff, etc). I am speaking about "normal" packages. I am allways using the upstream source, renaming it to orig.tar.gz and the diffs are created relative to this source. Now for reference I looked into other packages for reference and noted that some people repackage the upstream source, where it is not necessary. Easily notable when you look at the owner and group of the orig source.
Is this ok, prefered or not prefered? I allways understood the docs (and policy and whatever, which I obviously did not read in every detail, so please do not answer "debian-policy" or "debian-packaging manual") that the original upstream source should be used whenever possible. I know that ie xfree does it differently, but this is probably since xfree contains several upstream source files and uses a very clever concept of applying patches. But it seems every source package I am looking at now is repacked, are all my packages wrong? Please help us resolve this dispute, I'd really like to know what is correct. Christian
