Team packages maintained in bzr, one branch for the team or one for each debian directory?

[Sebastien Bacher]

(I sent this message to ubuntu-desktop-list and ubuntu-devel-list,
sending it also to the bazaar list now in case you guys have some
suggestions. Please Cc me on replies, I'm not subscribed to the list)

Hi,

We are looking at maintaining the ubuntu-desktop packages in bzr. The
idea is to store the debian directories there and to use
bzr-buildpackage and some other tools making the work easier.

There is a question though, which is to know if we should better use one
branch by package or one for everything. I'm trying to summarize some
advantages and inconveniences of each method:

* One branch by package:
+ that's the "clean" way using bzr
+ you can checkout and look at updates for the packages you are
interested in only
- you need to checkout or update ~100 different branches when you work
on all the packages
- you need to branch for every package when gutsy+1 opens

* One branch for all the packages:
+ you only need one command to branch, get or update the team packaging
sources
+ easier to look if something changed
- you need to checkout the debian directories for all the packages
(quite small)

The team contributors are likely to work on different packages and I
think it would be easier to have everything at the same location.

Daniel has written a "get-branches" tool to make easy to get or update
all the branches from a team, it has to connect and do checkout for
every package though which is quite slow and quite verbose.


What do you think? What method would you like better? Extra arguments
and thoughs are welcome!


Thanks,

Sebastien Bacher