[Oneiric-Topic] Packaging branches

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre]

Hi,

Thought I might share insight as a relatively new contributor ;)
[...]

> My experience since moving to bzr branches:
> - Much, much faster updating of packages
> - Branching packages is possible (e.g. working in a PPA)
> - Patches are a little bit harder to do, as the branch doesn't contain
> the files from the source tarball

I guess I agree, you need to download the orig tarball at that point,
but I feel using bzr bd-do to be quite helpful in dropping you
straight to a clean unpacked tarball directory once that orig tarball
is downloaded.

However, I feel it fails when using branches in the normal mode
precisely because of patches applied. I've had to unapply patches a
few times before running merge-upstream, and it feels rather like a
cumbersome and unnecessary step to me.

I fear normal mode also leaves room for mistakes such as doing changes
in-tree rather than using patches, even if this is probably an easy
point of entry for new contributors (quickly getting patches done, to
later step into packaging "proper")

> - People are often ignoring the branches and uploading directly (or
> forgetting do a bzr push) which means changes are sometimes dropped by
> accident
> - People often do merge requests to lp:ubuntu/package_name, even when
> there is a packaging branch

Agree. However, I've also run across two or three packages missing a
Vcs-* field in debian/control. I believe this should help at least a
little.

[...]
> Some issues that will remain:
> - It is possible to screw up the branches so that bzr merge-package
> throws a confusing error (I keep doing it).  Perhaps we need some hooks
> in bzr to stop this from occurring.  If it can be broken, it will be
> broken (repeatedly).

bzr merge-package sounds like one place where using packaging branches
in merge-mode would break too, no, seeing as the debian packages are
in normal-mode branches?

Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <mathieu.tl at gmail.com>
Freenode: cyphermox, Jabber: mathieu.tl at gmail.com
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