Re: Preferred git branch structure when upstream moves from tarballs to git
On Sat, 04 May 2019 at 21:10:34 +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> So far I have gained the impression that
> the kind of people who are using packaging-only git trees tend to be
> very conservative, and very comfortable with .dsc/tarball/patch/quilt
> based tools, and not really convinced of the usefulness of git.
A less common, but IMO valid, reason to use packaging-only git trees
is that your upstream source code consists of large non-text objects
that aren't managed efficiently by git. The openarena-data family of
packages are (I think) the only place I still use packaging-only git
trees, and the nexuiz-data package is an example of the sort of monster
that will typically be created if you don't.
I suppose that's a form of not really being convinced of the usefulness
of git: I'm convinced that git is useful for program source code and
metadata, but I'm not convinced that it's useful for multiple gigabytes
of models, textures etc. that are added and deleted more often than they
are edited. If there was a convenient way to use a lookaside object store
like git-lfs or git-annex for source packages, then I'd use that.
Arguably this is an instance of the same problem as some of those we have
around DFSG interpretation and whether "software" refers to programs or
to all blobs of bytes: our processes are designed for program source
code, and non-program content doesn't always fit very well into those
processes; but we can't just not ship the non-program content, because
we're trying to provide a self-contained software distribution with no
external dependencies.
smcv
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