Adopting pristine-tar

As of yesterday, I am the new maintainer of pristine-tar. As it is the case for most of Joey Hess’ creations, it is an extremely useful tool, and used in a very large number of Debian packages which are maintained in git.

My first upload was most of a terrain recognition nature: I did some housekeeping tasks, such as making the build idempotent and making sure all binaries are built with security hardening flags, and wrote a few automated test cases to serve as build-time and run-time regression test suite. No functional changes have been made.

As Joey explained when he orphaned it, there are a few technical challenges involved in making sure pristine-tar stays useful in the future. Although I did read some of the code, I am not particularly familiar with the internals yet, and will be more than happy to get co-maintainers. If you are interested, please get in touch. The source git repository is right there.