otto,

Debian policies is your land. You don't need to fix it yourself, but could you please define what exactly, if anything, should be done here?

Hello quanah and thanks for looking into MariaDB!

The Debian policy is intended for people doing Debian packaging (e.g. me) and when it talks about pristine source, it means that when preparing the package for official inclusion at debian.org repositories should have a completely custom made debian/ contents and take anything directly from upstream. For example the debian/changelog file in Debian should include only information about the package's history in debian.org repos.

This policy should not be read in a way that upstream projects like mariadb.org would not be recommended to have a debian/ directory. So in that sense this bug report is invalid. It is completely fine to have debian/ directory in upstream mariadb repos.

What is your use case? What are you trying to do, your own custom Debian packages or what? If you tell us what your goal was, maybe I can advise what you should to do achieve it.

When I have a question on policy, I check with a former colleague of mine, Russ Allbery. If you're not familiar with him, he works on Debian policy (see https://www.debian.org/intro/organization).

He confirms what I noted. It is recommended that upstream release tarballs do not contain a debian/ directory.

Do I do my own custom debian packages? Yes, I do. I'm attempting to achieve a state where MariaDB follows debian policy, so when I extract the tar archive your debian dir doesn't overwrite mine. Or, as per Russ:

> I generally use tar to strip out the debian dir, but it's nice when they

> just don't exist at all. ;)  They tend to overwrite my debian/ dir for

> zimbra on extract when doing packaging, so it's annoying to have to go

> back and fix things up in the first place.

Yup, exactly.  That's why we recommend against it.