Re: How to maintain packaging files for multiple distributions in the same tree?
Loïc Minier <lool+debian@via.ecp.fr> writes:
> On Thu, Jan 25, 2007, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
>> Evil. Don't change control at build time.
>
> Well, all GNOME packages update their control in the clean target, and
> I think this is ok. The GStreamer packages update their packages in
> a special "maint" target which is manual; this works okish, but this
> gets forgotten from time to time.
>
>> Beter to generate a debian/control.new from control.in and then fail
>> (with a helpfull message) if that differs from debian/control.
>
> That's an idea if the above mechanisms displease ftpmasters.
>
> However, it goes against having two controls for Maemo and Debian.
>
>> I think the simplest thing is to branch. You might want to upload some
>> ix to stable-proposed-updates, security or testing-proposed-updates in
>> which case your changelog gets additional entries not present in the
>> unstable changelog and so on. A branch fits there perfectly.
>
> I'm not convinced this will work. I can imagine this will either
> result in a fork or in a large manual process such as Ubuntu's; in both
> cases, the process doesn't encourage pushing the patches back to
> Debian (IMO, and from what I've seen).
>
> --
> Loïc Minier <lool@dooz.org>
I see a big difference between multiple releases like
stable/testing/unstable and a fork or parallel releases like Ubuntu.
In stable/testing/unstable you have releases with a fixed version that
can only split of from the main trunk. Any change to stable/testing
MUST be made special for the old version in stable/testing and forks
off the main developement on its own course. There is no developement
going on in stable/testing, just bugfixes. You often have to prepare
backports for patches from unstable to share fixes.
In Ubuntu you have a parallel version. You split of from the main
trunk but you follow parallel to it at a small distance. For every new
main version you want a new ubuntu version. Ubuntu versions aren't a
branch but rather a filter on top of the main release. The main
release changes, the filter remains constant (hopefully).
Branches don't work so well for ubuntu as you have to pull over the
changes from the main branch to the ubuntu branch on every
release. Which means (unneccessary) work.
MfG
Goswin
Reply to: