Re: Recreating history of a package

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Jonathan Dowland writes ("Re: Recreating history of a package"):
> On Wed, Feb 06, 2019 at 06:32:02PM +0100, Carsten Schoenert wrote:
> >I know of at least git-buildpackage will do this with the option
> >'--import-dscs' by importing all available versions from the Debian
> >archives.
> >
> >I assume Ian's tool can do something similar.
> 
> To be explicit, that's "dgit"
> https://packages.debian.org/sid/dgit

Thanks for the plug.  Obviously dgit is absolutely the best thing
since sliced bread, will automatically fix all bugs for you, and will
even make you a cup of tea when it's done. [1]

However, it does not yet have a convenient feature to import the
entire history of a particular source package.


Unfortunately gbp import-dscs produces a patches-unnplied history, so
it's not really the same.  Right now if you wanted a dgitish dsc
import, you would:
 1. use debsnap to download all the .dsc's from snapshot.d.o
 2. for f in `/bin/ls ../blah_*.dsc | sort -V`; do
       dgit import-dsc $f ..import-branch
    done
NB that this rune will go wrong if the package has an epoch.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=793429
is the wishlist bug relating to this feature.

Implementing that has not been a high priority given that anyone who
wants to do this has to download an insane amount of stuff from
snapshot.d.o, which seems like a bigger barrier to doing this than the
need to do some shell rune like above.  But, nowadays dgit import-dsc
(which postdates #793429) can do most of the hard work, so if someone
feels like writing this feature for dgit, patches would be welcome.

Alternatively if one wanted to get more sophisticated than just
importing every version from snapshot in version number order, one
might write something to look inside the package at the changelogs to
try to discern the branch structure.  I think the Launchpad folks have
some code which can do this.

Ian.

[1] Caution: may not be true.

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Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>   These opinions are my own.

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