Re: GUI tool for packaging
On Nov 15, 2012, at 04:15 PM, Thomas Kluyver wrote:
>- uscan puts upstream tarballs into ../, but svn-buildpackage expects them
>in ../tarballs/
>- To work on patches, you have the debian/ directory in amongst the
>upstream codebase. But having the rest of the codebase there clutters up
>information from the version control system. So I often end up with two
>copies of the packaging, and copying debian/patches/ between them.
Ubuntu Distributed Development (UDD) fixes both these real problems. Ignore
the choice of dvcs for the moment, the fact that you can branch a source
package that gives you upstream + debian, with quilt applied, is a huge win.
Once you've branched, you just start hacking. Then bzr-builddeb does all the
magic of creating the source and/or binary packages. No mucking about with
orig.tar.gz locations, uscan, mergeWithUpstream, etc, etc.
IMHO, UDD makes developing for Ubuntu much easier and faster than developing
for Debian, and a downright joy (usually, at least these days :).
In fact, Launchpad imports Debian source packages too, so even using UDD for
Debian development (modulo updating the svn branches) much easier too.
I think it would be very cool if Debian were to adopt the UDD workflow. I
know there are problems, controversies, and detractors, but I find it so much
more pleasant to develop with.
>- In the <pkg>.install list, a line with a single entry works quite
>differently from a line with two entries
Yes, and the documentation about this isn't great.
>- When you make a new patch, you have to 'quilt add' any files you want to
>modify before you can modify them. It's easy, and annoying, to forget that.
>(I know about 'quilt edit', but for other reasons my $EDITOR is set to an
>in-terminal editor, which isn't what I prefer for modifying large code
>files)
Agreed. The larger problem is that if you forget to quilt add before you edit
the file, adding it after the fact doesn't help. So you better have those
files under vcs so you can undo your change, quilt add the file, and then redo
the change. This is another way that UDD helps quite a bit.
>- You call pbuilder with a .dsc file, but dput with a .changes file.
Yeah, that one annoys me too. ;)
>To be clear, I'm not asking for solutions or workarounds to these
>individual issues. I'm sure there are good reasons things work the way they
>do - but being relatively new to this, the array of not-quite-connected
>tools is daunting.
You've identified real problems that don't really go away, you just learn
crufty workarounds and ignore the pain. OTOH, none of these are really
solvable by what *I* think of when I hear "graphical packaging tools". Maybe
I'm just thinking about it too narrowly. I'm also not much of a GUI person,
so I do like the command-line-iness of the UDD workflow. But maybe I'd fire
up the GUI once in a while to inspect a package I'm not familiar with.
Cheers,
-Barry
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