Re: Best practices for Debian developers who are also upstreams?
On Tue, 18 Feb 2020 at 15:47:17 -0500, Antoine Beaupré wrote:
> The tricky part here is generating a new version without mangling
> debian/changelog all the time. I haven't found a great story for that
> that works with git, but maybe you can generate syntetic commits to fake
> a new Debian package version in CI.
I think the way to do this is to have an uncommitted change to d/changelog
when you do your build, and choose your CI version numbers carefully so
that they interleave correctly with "real" version numbers.
https://gitlab.collabora.com/smcv/deb-build-snapshot/ (currently on my
employer's infrastructure, but I'll probably move it to Salsa at some
point) is designed for this workflow.
The version-number-generating part, deb-git-version-gen, implements the
careful choice of version numbers and has been split out into a separate
script which I might propose for inclusion in devscripts at some point -
it should be feasible to run as a git-buildpackage hook or similar,
and can either run dch itself, or output a simple version number or a
blob of JSON describing the package's versioning (the latter includes
some suggested arguments for dch).
> Also, this is not for everyone: it makes it hard for Debian folks to
> send updates to the git repository (because it might not be on
> debian.org infra)
This seems particularly weird for native packages, which are supposedly
"written specifically to be a Debian package" (Policy §5.6.12). When
maintaining upstream packages that include their own Debian-compatible
packaging, I sometimes make them non-native with versions like
1.2.3-0upstream1, which makes it trivial to repackage them as non-native
elsewhere.
> and inversely it makes it hard for "upstream" to make
> a release if they're not Debian developers.
This was a practical problem when Joey Hess left Debian: ikiwiki was a
native package, with no release procedure other than uploading it to
Debian, and I became a single point of failure for security releases
because I was suddenly the only person with both ikiwiki commit access
and Debian upload rights.
(I later disentangled it so that upstream releases are just git tags
pointing to a native package, and the Debian packaging is non-native.)
smcv
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