Re: svn management, git, etc

["Christan Chiesa" <christanc@gmail.com>]

hello,

OK, first of all i introduce myself as no one know me and i never did
something for X :). I'm Christian, I'm not a Debian Developer but, for
the moment, I'm the maintainer of some packages (all packages
maintained by Riccardo Setti, he's busy at the moment) and I'm
interested in X :)

I use svn for pkg-galago and pkg-utopia project (all hosted on Alioth)
and atm I'm really happy with it. I'm not a svn guru or something
similar i just use it for my Debian work without have any kind of
problem :)
As David said you don't need to have all source code in the svn but
only Debian/ for autobuild your packages (through svn-buildpackage). I
don't know how git could be more useful for you (maybe i should say us
;) ) but whit a suitable structure i think we couldn't switch to git.

My idea is to have 3 master-branches experimental unstable and stable
which have only the Debian Dir of all packages. something like:

unstable/
	app/
	    mesautils/
		     Debian/
	    tarballs/mesatuils_some-version.orig.tar.gz
(note: 	tarballs will not be in the svn repo,  it will exist only on
the local machine )
	data/
	driver/
	font/

experimental/
	app/
	......

stable/
	.....

Now, why switch to this style:

- easy to understand how you (maybe we ;) ) work. (atm i guess it's
not so understandable,  i agree with Danis though about this issue)

- easy for developer who are not involved in the project
(they don't have to know how we work) to work on it.
"hey, I'm $someone and i want to work on X but i don't know what
branch is should check out"

- we will not need anymore  the code in the svn.

- we could switch to Alioth which have more bandwidth and has a lot of
cool feature .

Why not :

I'm not a Debian X developer, in fact I don't know what are your
needs, this is only my experience with svn and Debian.

What i think is, if people want develop X and maintain it for Debian
they should distinguish the 2 things.

For example:

I'm not a coder so i cannot provide (code) patch for X,  what i can do
is maintain the Debian packages: clean lintian errors, add copyright,
change something if policy changes, triage bugs, talk with upstream.

I need for it only  a easy-to-use svn structure, nothing else.

If I'm a coder and a Debian maintainer i will need the same tools of
the freedesktop guys plus a easy-to-use svn structure.

Now, if people want code on X will need git for theyr work, i guess :).

OK, these are a lot of words (a italian man said "the facts count the
words are zero" (literals translation)).

What i can do now if people agree with my proposal (or at last want
try this style) is :

- open a project on alioth. Import the 7.1 branches as experimental,
trunk as unstable...for stable?
- Document what i made, and write a simple tutorial on how people
should work on it. (Debian provides a lot of cool apps which will help
our work)

regards,
christian

p.s (sorry for my bad english :( )