Git usage in the pkg-java team

[Ludovic Claude <ludovic.claude@laposte.net>]

Hello,

I'm banging my head trying to use Git to store the packaging for a new
project whose upstream uses Git (on Github). Git is very powerful and
fast, but it comes at the cost of simplicity it seems.

I'm still not clear how to do this task. I read the the wiki pages, but
it looks like it's simpler to repack the upstream sources then use
git-import-orig to import the upstream sources in your new Git
repository. Do you have any better idea for doing this tasks? It looks
wasteful to loose the ability to do a simple git pull to get the latest
code from upstream.

http://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/Git
http://honk.sigxcpu.org/projects/git-buildpackage/manual-html/gbp.import.html#GBP.IMPORT.NEW.UPSTREAM
https://wiki.debian.org/Java/JavaGit

Could somebody write some receipes on the wiki for some common use cases:
- Upstream does not use Git and I want to create a new package
  - bonus: I want to filter out some files from the raw upstream tarball
  - bonus 2: I want to patch some files on upstream
- Upstream uses Git and I want to create a new package
  - bonus: I want to filter out some files from the raw upstream tarball
  - bonus 2: I want to patch some files on upstream
- Given a package with a working debian/watch and get-orig-source target
in debian/rules, how to I upload the new upstream in Git?
- Given a new version tag in the upstream Git repository, how do I
create the packaging for this new version?

Another grip is that with svn, I could get all the package sources from
the team with one command.
  svn checkout svn+ssh://$DEBSVNUSER@svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-java

With Git, I need to fetch each packages one by one.

The pkg-ruby-extras team has a solution for this issue: they use a tool
called mr and some configuration and you can get all packages managed by
that team with a few commands.

I propose that we use this tool for pkg-java as well, this could help us
to manage those huge lists of packages. I'm setting up mr for pkg-java,
tell me if you like it.
https://wiki.debian.org/Java/JavaGit

Ludovic