Re: Introducing dgit - git integration with the Debian archive
Hello Ian,
thanks for your work on dgit. It looks very promising!
I'm sorry to have missed that impromptu BOF at debconf, I would have
definitely arranged myself to be there if I had known its existence.
On Thu, 22 Aug 2013, Ian Jackson wrote:
> With regret I must note that currently you can't use it if you don't
> have a full DD account on both the Debian systems and on Alioth. Even
> if you just want a read-only mode. This is due to deficiencies in the
> archive software and in Alioth, which I have worked around in very
> unpleasant ways. I'm hoping that this will improve fairly soon.
> Please see the BUGS section of the manpage.
“For `3.0 (quilt)' packages, dgit has to do more work to work around some
braindamage in way dpkg-source handles changes made to this format. See also
the BUGS section. We recommend against the use of `3.0 (quilt)'.”
“`3.0 (quilt)' packages have an additional difficulty: if these
are edited in the most normal way, and then fed to dpkg-buildpackage,
dpkg-source will add extra quilt patch metadata to the source tree
during the source package build. This extra metadata is then of course
not included in the git history. So dgit push needs to commit it for you,
to make sure that the git history and archive contents are identical.
That this is necessary is a bug in the `3.0 (quilt)' format.”
I don't think that "3.0 (quilt)" does things without justification so
calling those features "braindamage" is not really nice. Clearly the
quilt format duplicates some of the VCS features (with its .pc directory)
and this is probably what you are referring to in the above paragraph.
That said I have always thought of the "3.0 (quilt)" source package as
something that we should be able to generate ouf of a VCS tree, not
something to be directly stored in a VCS repository.
In any case, I'm open to suggestions to improve the format to better suit
your needs... so can you can explain me more precisely what's causing you
issues? Either here or better in a bug report against dpkg-dev.
I would really like to find a good workflow that suits "3.0 (quilt)".
Badly supporting half the archive looks like a problem.
BTW, instead of advising against "3.0 (quilt)" you should rather recommend
the usage of the --single-debian-patch option when using that format...
this will make it mostly work like "1.0".
I have read the manual page but there some things that I don't really
understand on the design yet. So let me ask some questions:
- is there some server side part (running on alioth)?
what does it take care of?
- what/who creates the initial repository? and what/who keeps it in sync with
the (non-dgit-based) archive uploads?
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Discover the Debian Administrator's Handbook:
→ http://debian-handbook.info/get/
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