Re: best policies for third party Debian packaging and get-orig-source target

[Faheem Mitha <faheem@faheem.info>]

On Mon, 29 Jul 2013 10:22:35 -0700, Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> wrote:
> Faheem Mitha <faheem@faheem.info> writes:
>
>> Currently the Debian packaging is part of the same repository as the
>> software, in the subdirectory debian/. I'm wondering if I should put it
>> in a separate repository. Also, currently the package is being built as
>> a Debian native package, which isn't really appropriate. I guess I could
>> add a get-orig-source target for building the orig tarball to rules, but
>> is it Ok to build a orig.tar.gz file from a local repository, or is it
>> necessary to get it from remote? If the former, are there any
>> recommended approaches for, for example, passing the location of the
>> repository to the get-orig-source target?
>
> What I do:
>
>     http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/notes/debian/git.html#combine
>
> The short version is that using pristine-tar and git-buildpackage to
> manage upstream and debian branches as a merge between your released
> tarballs works really well.  If you don't release tarballs at all, you can
> still use the same tactic and have git-buildpackage construct an
> *.orig.tar.gz file for you from the repository.

Hi Russ,

Thanks for the comments. I hope you are doing well.

I've now read your web page. I also posted this to Stack Overflow.

http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/84829/best-practices-for-packaging-self-created-software-for-debian

and talked to people on #mercurial.

There seems to be some concensus that the way to go (in mercurial terms) is
to

a) have a default branch which is just the code, no packaging.

b) have a second non-default named branch (the obvious name choice is
debian), which is the code + the Debian packaging.

Then one can periodically merge the default branch into the 'debian'
branch.

I had thought initially of a branch which just had the Debian
packaging, and then making a third temporary branch to merge the
default and 'debian' branch, but it seems this is considered to be one
branch too many...

Does this sound in line with what you are doing? It seems like it to
me, but your web pages have a lot of details to deal with the case
where the code is from some third party with tarballs etc. I don't
plan to bother with tarballs.

As I wrote in the SO question, I wonder if it makes sense to have
make-orig-source first assume that it is inside a hg repos and then
run 'hg archive' on that. If this fails, then clone the repos from
remote, and run 'hg archive' on the cloned repos. However, I've not
seen anyone doing this in practice.

                                                    Regards, Faheem