Moving to Bazaar

[Yuriy Kozlov]

This seems relevant to this discussion:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2008-November/000514.html

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 8:33 AM, Harald Sitter <apachelogger at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> KHello World!
>
> At yesterday's meeting we discussed the possibility of moving the packaging of
> all KDE core packages to bazaar branches.
> The general feeling seemed to be in favor of starting a migration.
>
> Scott, who had reservation about the performance of bzr didn't make it to the
> meeting, so we probably should work this out via mail. In general we should
> get every question or problem resolved before starting to use bzr for real.
>
> I propose that we create a testing branch of kdebase-workspace so that people
> can try using it for real and find possible flaws. Since workspace also got the
> biggest packaging I suppose it should also give a good indication about the
> performance.
>
> <james_w> in a few months there will be branches to play with, proper
> launchpad hosting for them, faster bzr, tools to make the work easier, and
> ways to replace e.g. patches.ubuntu.com
> ...
> <james_w> anyone that wants to discuss that sort of thing is encouraged to
> head over to vcs-pkg.org
> ...
> <james_w> for details on what we are up to in Ubuntu you can visit
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DistributedDevelopment
>
> Advantages would be:
>  * Improved collaboration
>  * Improved reviewing capabilities for sponsors
>  * Improved error tracing
>  * Decreased amount of uploads with minor changes
>  * At a more advanced stage of the distributed development, merging with
>    Debian should become a lot easier
>
> Disadvantages:
>  * One needs to know how to use bzr and bzr builddeb/buildpackage
>
> Remarks:
>  * smarter wants to improve the documentation a bit
>  * Until the complete Ubuntu Distributed Development model starts everyone
>    has to use bzr, otherwise merging with the archive causes some extra work
>  * james_w noted, that full-source branches is the way to go, since it makes
>    handling "patches" easier
>    - This however conflicts with the common sense of good packaging (which
>      would suggest patches as patch files rather than applying directly to the
>      source)
>    - Also it is fairly impossible to use full-source branches for most core
>     KDE
>      packages since they are usually fairly big (workspace contains 92 MiB of
>      uncompressed data, now say that grows 1 MiB of compressed diff every
>      month
>      due to regular updates we are pretty easily at 100 MiB, then we have a
>     new
>      x.* release ever 6 months which causes a compressed diff of at estimated
>      10 MiB...)
>    - We agreed to look at this once the distributed development is in a more
>      advanced state
>
>
>
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