Re: RFC: Final update of DEP-14 on naming of git packaging branches
Richard Laager <rlaager@wiktel.com> writes:
> On 8/29/20 3:33 PM, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> I think the primary thing that bothers me about this workflow is that
>> experimental becomes an ephemeral branch, which appears and disappears
>> based on the vagaries of the release cycle.
> To me, that feels like the branch is an accurate representation of
> reality. The packages in experimental are ephemeral and appear and
> disappear too, right?
Yes, this is true.
>> That said, one way in which this becomes concrete is the Vcs-Git
>> control field. What do you put in the branch field for your
>> experimental upload? Naming debian/experimental is clearly wrong; that
>> branch is highly likely to not exist when someone later checks. Naming
>> debian/unstable is also clearly wrong; the package is not based on that
>> branch.
> I wouldn't (and don't) put a branch name there. I don't think it serves
> a practical purpose. If it does, I guess a corollary is that I/we should
> be specifying debian/buster there for stable updates and likewise
> debian/buster-backports for backports. Is that a thing people actually
> do? I haven't been, but I can do so if that is a best practice.
Vcs-* as defined in policy identify "the branch used for development of
new versions of the Debian package." I think whether that should point to
the stable release branch for stable uploads is debatable; I can see
arguments either way. In practice, it generally does not because most
packages never receive a stable upload and thus Vcs-Git is set to whatever
it was set to during the last upload to unstable that made it into the
release. So the de facto meaning is the branch on which new development
happens, not the release branch for the stable release.
The problem in my case with not putting a branch name in Vcs-Git is that,
for packages for which I'm also upstream, the default branch in the
repository named in that header is the upstream development branch, which
contains no Debian packaging files and thus would be a very confusing
thing for debcheckout to clone. So I have to name *some* branch, which
right now is debian/master and would be debian/latest.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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