As discussed in yesterday's meeting, I've been investigating git- debrebase and dgit as tools for maintaining the linux source package with upstream included. It seems like they could make it a lot easier to add and rebase patches, while maintaining some patch history and fast-forward branches (unlike a regular git rebase). Both tools are in the dgit package, and there is a tutorial in the dgit-maint-debrebase(7) manual page. Using these tools requires three main changes to the git repository: 1. The upstream code, with full history, is merged into Debian branches. This makes the git repository substantially larger. This may be a problem for some users checking out development versions. We might need to modify instructions in debian-kernel-handbook and elsewhere to recommend a clone with limited depth. Currently we merge between the sid and master branches, but the corresponding upstream branches are not (and should not be) merged. We may need to implement a custom merge strategy to make this work. It sems that git-debrebase does not (yet) deal well with merges; see the description of the "--experimntal-merge-resolution" option in its manual page. 2. Debian changes to upstream code are applied as commits. The debian/patches directory is created and committed by dgit only as necessary. This means that "git cherry-pick", "git am" etc. should work. We will still need to add DEP-3 pseudo-headers to the commit message though. We can use a "Gbp-Pq: Topic ..." trailer in the commit message to organise changes into topics, which are mapped to subdirectories. I wrote a check-commits script (paralleling check-patches.sh) which checks for the expected DEP-3 pseudo-headers in Debian commits to the upstream code. check-patches.sh will only operate on featureset patches, which still have to be managed as patches-in-git. I also updated the genpatch-* scripts and makefiles to cope with this. 3. All generated files in the source package will be included in Debian branches. dgit requires that the git tree corresponding to some version of a Debian source package exactly matches the unpacked package, with the exception of the .pc directory for a 3.0 (quilt) package. The only generated files which really need to be present in the source package are debian/control and debian/tests/control. We also need to include debian/control.md5sum so that a stale debian/control file can be detected. I made changes to debian/bin/gencontrol.py and debian/rules to enable this behaviour. I also changed the way debian/changelog is checksummed so that debian/control.md5sum won't change so often. --- A dgit-suitable version of the master branch now exists, named dgit- master. This is experimental, so DO NOT USE THIS BRANCH to build and upload source packages. But please do try making changes to this branch in parallel to your changes to the master branch. All the changes I described above are only on this branch, not the master branch. The initial conversion from debian/patches to git commits is done using gbp-pq, which can lose headers (bug #905934). I used a locally patched version for the conversion. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap.
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