On Sun, May 15, 2011 at 10:46:00AM -0400, Nikolaus Rath wrote: > Am I missing a tool? Or is a bad idea to try to manage debian/ in a VCS? > Or should my repo also include the upstream source rather than just the > debian directory? I've never been a big fan of having just the debian/ directory under version control. It makes it a real pain to checkout a source package and work on it, and it also makes it impossible to use the VCS to manage the source package as a whole, making one of the major gains of a VCS redundant. Personally, I would have separate "upstream" and "debian" branches and import all the upstream releases onto the upstream branch. You can also use pristine-tar to recreate the orig.tar from the VCS (see git-buildpackage for example). You can then merge each new upstream release onto the debian branch and add the debian/ changes on top. This means that each debian/ change is tied to a specific upstream version, and you can merge new upstream releases easily and compare changes between upstream releases and different debian revisions etc. You can also have multiple upstream branches, so you can track development and stable releases. And you can do the same for debian, so you can maintain stable releases in unstable, development releases in experimental should you need to, and also handle stable point releases, backports etc. with ease. And because it's all in one place, you can cherry pick changes, branch and merge at will etc. You also gain (with git) signed tags for all upstream imports and debian releases, so you also have integrity checking and cryptographic validation of the entire thing as well. Regards, Roger -- .''`. Roger Leigh : :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/ `. `' Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/ `- GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848 Please GPG sign your mail.
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