Re: Recording VCS information in the source package info

[James Westby <jw+debian@jameswestby.net>]

On Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:35:31 -0600, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi again,
> 
> Three more thoughts and I’ll shut up.  (Is there a web page and
> mailing list for this VCS-based archive project?)

Hi,

Thanks for the interest, your comments are valuable.

There is some information at

  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DistributedDevelopment/

which points to this mailing list:

  https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-distributed-devel

There is also some overlap with

  http://vcs-pkg.org/

> Longer term, IIUC you could eliminate the source packages, but I
> understand that it takes time to migrate.

Yes, that's a goal. We want to get to the point where people don't dput
source packages to upload (we already have source-only uploads in
Ubuntu), they request a build from a bzr branch instead. Source packages
will probably stick around for a while for various reasons: GPL
compliance, similarity to Debian, mirroring, etc.

> The main not-so-nice thing about only providing the tree would be that
> whoever checks this would have to iterate over revisions looking for
> that tree hash.  To avoid this, it might even be worth just using the
> revision (sorry for the wobble --- it just took me a while to understand
> what you’re doing).  Whatever tool you use to build the source package
> and insert this field (bzr-buildpackage --ubuntu, I guess) could
> disallow building from a dirty tree.

I agree that you may have to iterate, but there will typically only be a
couple of candidate revisions the way our system works, and having both
the revision and the tree narrows the search further.

I'm not keen on requiring a build from a clean tree, as that isn't how
some developers would want to work, and so I feel that if a system that
allows that isn't to difficult to achieve we should put the burden on
the automated side.

> Using just a tree hash would allow lower-level tools to compute the
> hash.  That is, as long as it is clear what format to use, dpkg-source
> could compute the hash, or the archive software could compute the hash
> itself and add it to Sources.

Yes, that would also be a possibility.

Thanks,

James