[storm] New lp:~storm/storm/packaging branch

[James Henstridge]

On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 12:05 AM, Jamu Kakar <jkakar at kakar.ca> wrote:
> Hi Jason,
>
> On Fri, Dec 4, 2009 at 6:33 AM, Jason Baker <jbaker at zeomega.com> wrote:
>> Just out of sheer curiosity, what is the purpose of this change?  What
>> advantages are there to doing things that way?
>
> The primary purpose of the change, at least the reason I made it, is
> to keep the mainline history clean.  I use AutoPPA to build packages
> and if you look back in the history you'll see fair amount of noise
> created as a result of AutoPPA merging changes made to produce a
> build back into trunk.  Using a separate packaging branch alleviates
> this and keeps trunk a pure upstream branch.  It's a pattern that
> subunit uses, and I think Bazaar too.
>
> I've been told by real packagers (I'm mostly a faker) that this kind
> of separation is preferred because it's somehow easier for them to
> make changes.  I don't fully understand why this is, to be honest.

What most of the Debian/Ubuntu packagers don't like is upstream
tarballs that contain a debian directory.  Since the debian source
packages are made up of a pristine source tarball and a diff, having a
debian directory in the tarball introduces the possibility of
conflicts when updating to a new version.


James.