Re: [Debconf-team] [Debconf-announce] DC13 Final Report

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

Patty Langasek writes ("[Debconf-announce] DC13 Final Report"):
> Steve and I are offering our help - just send us facts that need to be
> included in the report and we can work on getting the information presented
> sensibly, professionally, whatever.  We can work on copy-editing and general
> editing; we just need the details filled in.

I don't know exactly how this would fit into the DC13 Final Report,
but it might be good to say something about dgit.  Here's what I
just came up with:


dgit is a new tool which allows any package to be downloaded, edited,
and NMUed by someone who likes to use git.  dgit's user does not need
to know about or understand the maintainer's source code management
practices.  They simply edit the actual source package contents in
git, and when they're done dgit will let them push (upload) the result
to the archive.

Although dgit is all my own code, its design came out of a number of
very intense discussions held at Debconf 13.  I particularly want
mention Joey Hess, who deserves at least half the credit for the
conversation where we each came to the table with a different gigantic
cloud castle which would never be implemented or deployed, and came
away with the present design - small, immediately implementable and
immediately deployable.

The first useable version of dgit was uploaded before the end of DC13.

There is still much work to be done: in particular dgit does not yet
work properly for Debian Maintainers or have a useable read-only mode.
And its support for use by the package maintainer is not always good,
depending on the maintainer's workflow.  So it is presently mostly a
tool for DD NMUers.


Feel free to edit etc. as appropriate.

Ian.