pristine-tar - regenerate pristine tarballs
pristine-tar [OPTIONS] gendelta
tarball delta
pristine-tar [OPTIONS] gentar
delta tarball
pristine-tar [OPTIONS] commit
tarball [
upstream]
pristine-tar [OPTIONS] checkout
tarball
pristine-tar [OPTIONS] list
pristine-tar [OPTIONS] verify
tarball
pristine-tar can regenerate an exact copy of a pristine upstream tarball using
only a small binary
delta file and the contents of the tarball, which
are typically kept in an
upstream branch in version control.
The
delta file is designed to be checked into version control along-side
the
upstream branch, thus allowing Debian packages to be built entirely
using sources in version control, without the need to keep copies of upstream
tarballs.
pristine-tar supports compressed tarballs, calling out to
pristine-gz(1),
pristine-bz2(1), and
pristine-xz(1) to produce the pristine
gzip, bzip2, and xz files.
This takes the specified upstream
tarball, and generates a small binary
delta file that can later be used by pristine-tar gentar to recreate the
tarball.
If the delta filename is "-", it is written to standard output.
This takes the specified
delta file, and the files in the current
directory, which must have identical content to those in the upstream tarball,
and uses these to regenerate the pristine upstream
tarball.
If the delta filename is "-", it is read from standard input.
pristine-tar commit generates a pristine-tar delta file for the specified
tarball, and commits it to version control. The
pristine-tar
checkout command can later be used to recreate the original tarball based
only on the information stored in version control.
The
upstream parameter specifies the tag or branch that contains the same
content that is present in the tarball. This defaults to
"refs/heads/upstream", or if there's no such branch, any branch
matching "upstream". The name of the tree it points to will be
recorded for later use by
pristine-tar checkout. Note that the content
does not need to be 100% identical to the content of the tarball, but if it is
not, additional space will be used in the delta file.
The delta files are stored in a branch named "pristine-tar", with
filenames corresponding to the input tarball, with ".delta"
appended. This branch is created or updated as needed to add each new delta.
If
tarball already exists previously, it will only be overwritten if it
does not match a hash of the tarball that has been committed to version
control.
This regenerates a copy of the specified
tarball using information
previously saved in version control by
pristine-tar commit.
This lists tarballs that pristine-tar is able to checkout from version control.
Verifies whether an existing
tarball matches the one that has been
committed to version control.
- -v
- --verbose
- Verbose mode, show each command that is run.
- -d
- --debug
- Debug mode.
- -k
- --keep
- Don't clean up the temporary directory on exit.
- -m message
- --message=message
- Use this option to specify a custom commit message to
pristine-tar commit.
Applies to the commit command.
- -s signaturefile
- --signature-file=signaturefile
- Use this option to optionally commit or checkout an
upstream signature file for the tarball. Note that extraction of
signatures is not performed by default.
Applies to the commit and checkout commands.
- -r
- --recompress
- Use this option to tell pristine-tar that it is OK to
recompress the tarball if 1) the tarball can't be regenerated or 2) the
delta file produced from the original tarball is larger than a given
threshold (see also -B/--recompress-threshold-bytes and
-T/ --recompress-threshold-percent).
Note that this modifies the original tarball on disk, and you
probably shouldn't use it if you are also storing a upstream GPG signature
of the original tarball (see --signature-file).
On the other hand, the actual contents of the tarball stored by pristine-tar
will be identical to the content of the upstream original tarbal
even if the compressed tarball itself won't be bit-by-bit identical to the
one released by upstream.
A copy of the original tarball will be saved with ".backup" added
to its filename.
Applies to the commit and gendelta commands.
- -B N
- --recompress-threshold-bytes=N
- Recompress original tarball if the generated delta is
larger then N bytes. Default: 524288000 (500 kB).
If this option is passed explicitly in the command line, it implies
--recompress.
Applies to the commit and gendelta commands.
- -P N
- --recompress-threshold-percent=N
- Recompress original tarball if the generated delta is
larger than N% of the size of the original tarball. Default: 30.
If this option is passed explicitly in the command line, it implies
--recompress.
Applies to the commit and gendelta commands.
Suppose you maintain the hello package, in a git repository. You have just
created a tarball of the release,
hello-1.0.tar.gz, which you will
upload to a "forge" site.
You want to ensure that, if the "forge" loses the tarball, you can
always recreate exactly that same tarball. And you'd prefer not to keep copies
of tarballs for every release, as that could use a lot of disk space when
hello gets the background mp3s and user-contributed levels you are planning
for version 2.0.
The solution is to use pristine-tar to commit a delta file that efficiently
stores enough information to reproduce the tarball later.
cd hello
git tag -s 1.0
pristine-tar commit ../hello-1.0.tar.gz 1.0
Remember to tell git to push both the pristine-tar branch, and your tag:
git push --all --tags
Now it is a year later. The worst has come to pass; the "forge" lost
all its data, you deleted the tarballs to make room for bug report emails, and
you want to regenerate them. Happily, the git repository is still available.
git clone git://github.com/joeyh/hello.git
cd hello
pristine-tar checkout ../hello-1.0.tar.gz
Only tarballs, gzipped tarballs, bzip2ed tarballs, and xzed tarballs are
currently supported.
Currently only the git revision control system is supported by the
"checkout" and "commit" commands. It's ok if the working
copy is not clean or has uncommitted changes, or has changes staged in the
index; none of that will be touched by "checkout" or
"commit".
- TMPDIR
- Specifies a location to place temporary files, other than
the default.
- PRISTINE_TAR
- Defines command line options to be assumed by pristine-tar.
Any options passed explicitly on the command line will override those.
Options will be split on whitespaces, so if you want to pass an option that
needs an argument, use the --opt=arg syntax instead of --opt
arg.
- PRISTINE_ALL_XDELTA
- Defines the underlying binary delta tool to be used for new
deltas. Supported values are "xdelta3" (default) and
"xdelta".
Existing deltas will be handled with the original tool that was used to
create them, regardless of the value of
$PRISTINE_ALL_XDELTA.
Joey Hess <
[email protected]>
Licensed under the GPL, version 2 or above.