[Oneiric-Topic] Packaging branches

[Martin Pitt]

Robert Ancell [2011-04-13 10:20 +1000]:
> >  * 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.
> I hadn't noticed that.  The seems like absolutely the wrong behaviour. 
> Can this be fixed?

I'm afraid it's called a feature :/

> Current method (perhaps I'm missing something here):
> 1. Checkout bzr branch of debian/ directory

Right, debcheckout -a packagename.

> 2. Get tarball of current version (I use apt-get source, though you have
> to be careful that it is the same version)
> 3. Get tarball of latest version (I use bzr-buildpackage and then ctrl-C
> once I have the tarball in the build-area/ directory)

Not necessary, bzr bd-do or bzr bd -S do that for you. If the archive
already has it, it gets it from there, otherwise it uses uscan to
download it from upstream.

> 4. Unpack tarballs somewhere manually
> 5. Copy debian directory

bzr bd-do does that. It puts you into a temporary dir with full source
which you can work in, and if you exit 0, it copies back debian/ so
that you can commit the changes.

> 6. Diff two versions for changes (i.e. NEWS and configure.ac) - I use
> meld here

I usually don't need that for NEWS, as you can just grab the part
which applies to the latest release. configure.ac is tricky indeed,
usually I find it easier to get it from an upstream git diff. If
that's impractical, debdiffing the old against the new source works
too, of course.

> 7. Update debian/rules debian/control etc
> 8. Muck around with quilt/edit-patch to add/update/remove patches

quilt push / edit stuff / quilt update etc. should be done in the bzr
bd-do work tree.

> 9. Copy back debian/ directory changes to bzr branch

bzr bd-do does that when exit 0

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