[Oneiric-Topic] Packaging branches

[Martin Pitt]

Robert Ancell [2011-04-11 10:36 +1000]:
> - 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

I agree that these are annoying indeed.

However, after having worked with the "normal mode" branches for a
while, I still don't like them better:

 * They come with quilt patches pre-applied in the source, which is
   not only horribly confusing and error prone, but also breaks
   merge-upstream pretty thoroughly.

 * They still ignore the actually interesting problem: maintaining
   patches themselves with revision control, with
   looms/threads/pipelines/name du jour. I. e. they throw all this
   bzr overhead on the bits that we don't need in bzr (the upstream
   code), but don't actually help us with patch management.

 * They are incompatible with upstream bzr branches even for those
   projects whose native trunks are in Launchpad and bzr already.

So in summary I must say that the main effect from the full branches
is that people make a lot more errors and everything is slower :-(

Martin
-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)