---
title: "The orig tarball"
date: 2018-10-08T15:26:20+01:00
draft: true
---

A few pain points as an Arch packager:

- I still need to generate the orig tarball myself. And once I have done that,
- I still need to merge the content of that tarball in the packaging repo,
  (where the debian folder is, with the packaging data)

I care about not having to do that myself, first because that could be
automated in most cases, but also because then I don't have to try and fiddle
with the tarball until I meet the requirements of the `rules` file.

From what I gather, `uscan` can already make something out of a git (VCS in
general?) repository. Maybe somebody will integrate that someday.

In my dream world I would like to be able to do:

```
gbp clone
[update the reference for the upstream branch]
gbp import-orig
```

This would `git archive` (or potentially other rules defined somewhere),
creating the orig tarball, and then create a new branch with the merged
content of the tarball plus the debian folder.

Of course this doesn't help non-git users, but that's another issue which I
hope Debian will also cover someday.

----

This is not actually possible? Since how would you even version your thing so
that gbp/uscan understand you don't want a tag/release.