NAME¶

pristine-tar - regenerate pristine tarballs

SYNOPSIS¶

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

DESCRIPTION¶

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.

COMMANDS¶

OPTIONS¶

-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.

EXAMPLES¶

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

LIMITATIONS¶

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".

ENVIRONMENT¶

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.

AUTHOR¶

Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>

Licensed under the GPL, version 2 or above.