Re: Status of dgit (good for NMUs and fast-forwarding Debian branches)

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

Russ Allbery writes ("Re: Status of dgit (good for NMUs and fast-forwarding Debian branches)"):
> Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> writes:
> > So dpkg-source strips these options files out when it builds the
> > package ?
> 
> Correct.

Oh my god.

> > Surely then if someone does an NMU based on the source package the
> > "single debian patch"ness will be lost ?
> 
> Correct, and that's partly the point.  It means that the maintainer
> changes are collected into one patch, but NMU patches are kept separate
> from that one patch.  (So I guess I misspoke -- it's not exactly like the
> 1.0 format patch situation.  It's like that for the maintainer, but
> maintains separate NMU patches.)

I think the answer is that in this situation the maintainer can't use
dgit push.  I think the idea that dgit push should do different things
for the maintainer and an NMUer is pretty repulsive.  It is this kind
of craziness that I was trying to get away from.

Does dpkg-source provide a way to collapse all the patches into one ?
If so you could use that before doing dgit push, and have much the
same effect.

Or you could specify the single Debian patch in debian/options rather
than local-options, and pick up NMUs out of git.  dgit fetch will make
commit(s) containing the NMU changes for you, although currently
you may end up with multiple NMUs squashed into a single git commit.

Or you could simply ignore the format `3.0 (quilt)' thing entirely and
allow it to automatically accumulate one diff per upload, and
presumably clean it out occasionally.

Ian.