Hi,

Simon Richter highlighted on #devuan-dev that some of Devuan's orig tarballs are
different to Debian's. Whilst they are consistent within Devuan, he was trying
to bootstrap riscv64 on daedalus and ran into file conflicts with bookworm in
reprepro.

Since my involvement in Devuan, we have discouraged the use of pristine-tar (at
the instigation of CenturionDan, IIRC) to avoid binary blobs in git. Given the
recent xz backdoor, I have been satisfied that our position was justifiable.
However, it is worth reconsidering in the light of Simon's request.

It seems to me that there are a few options:-

 1) Continue as we are (internally consistent) and say that frakendevubian
    setups are unsupported.

 2) Use pristine-tar to ensure orig tarballs are binary equivalent and tolerate
    the binary blobs in git.

 3) Download orig tarballs from Debian as part of the build rather than
    generating them afresh. Note that this will not work for packages where we
    are ahead of Debian (slim, elogind) or Debian has no package (eudev).

Both 2) and 3) would only very gradually fix the situation as we can't change
existing orig tarballs in dak. So it is only an option for ceres and only when a
new upstream source appears.

You may have other suggestions I haven't considered, if so do say!

Thanks for your thoughts.

Best wishes

Mark