On Thu, 15 Aug 2013 16:30:49 +0200, intrigeri wrote:
Picking up one point from our BoF at DebConf:
> Two years git
> =============
> * git packaging following upstream??
> git-import-orig --upstream-vcs-tag= makes it easy.
> See debconf-discuss recent discussion, it has more details about
> how this works. [abe can add that to the docs]
Some thoughts on this topic:
"Makes it easy" seems to be true, even if it takes a few more steps,
as described on e.g. https://wiki.debian.org/CDBS+git-buildpackage
git remote add upstream-repo ${upstream_git_url}
git fetch upstream-repo
git-import-orig --pristine-tar --sign-tags --upstream-vcs-tag=${tag} ${path-to-fetched-tarball}
Nice so far; except that a simple `git-import-orig --pristine-tar
--uscan' doesn't work anymore :/ (Or does it? But even then, manually
specifying tag names seems like a regression in comfort to me.)
Ok, next problem: Unless I'm mistaken, which might very well be the
case, the "local" remotes are not pushed, so no one else will know
that I added this nice upstream-repo remote.
Which means, as a first step, if we want to go into this direction,
that we'll need the upstream git URL somewhere in the package/repo. A
possible solution might be DEP12/UMEGAYA, the spec for a
debian/upstream file.
http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep12 (dead right now but this works:
http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/dep/web/deps/dep12.mdwn?view=markup
)
http://wiki.debian.org/UpstreamMetadata
This spec has all kinds of interesting fields, among them Repository.
(And also things like Bug-Submit which we might want to use in `dpt
forward-{bug,patch}. Oh, and they probably also need github support.
But I digress.)
Ok, so we can write a YAML file called debian/upstream which contains
the repository URL for the remote. And how does the value get there?
CPAN::META::Spec has a resources field with exactly this information
(and other intersting stuff, like bugtracker), and all newer
META.{yml,json} files actually provide it, at least in my experience.
https://metacpan.org/pod/CPAN::Meta::Spec#resources
So it shouldn't be too hard to get the information from META.yml in the
distribution into debian/upstream (YAML) in our package. (Not only for
the repository URL but also for all other mapable fields, if we're
there.)
I guess this could be added to dh-make-perl or dpt-package-check or
somewhere else.
Summary, or: not sure where this leads us to:
- For "git packaging following upstream" we somehow need the upstream
git URL. This seems possible if someone writes the glue code
between META.yml and debian/upstream.
- Then everyone has to "git remote add && git fetch" ...
- Then "git-import-orig --uscan" doesn't work anymore ...
- And then, the very general question: What does this buy us? At
first glance, tracking upstream git sounds very sexy but what are
the concrete advantages?
Having all upstream commits locally is nice to step through them;
adding fixes is not so trivial, at least (in my understanding) 'git
cherry-pick' doesn't work as long as we are using quilt patches;
and 'git format-patch' and adding the file under debian/patches is
not much easier than downloading the patch from github or
wherever.
And now I'm kind of stuck on how to conclude this mail; I guess the
message is: Tell me what you think :)
Cheers,
gregor
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