Distributed development toolset (Re: ArchiveReorganisation and sponsoring)

[Colin Watson]

On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 06:30:40PM -0400, Scott Kitterman wrote:
> On Sun, 31 Aug 2008 22:40:36 +0100 Philip Wyett <philwyett at gmx.com> wrote:
> >Maybe a trial set of maybe half a dozen packages that are in Ubuntu
> >version control presently could be used as a test bed to see how much of
> >an effect it does make over the development and package processes.
> 
> I've already been somewhat involved in this.  For Gutsy this was tried with 
> the all the core KDE packages for Kubuntu.  I ended up begging a sponsor 
> into taking a debdiff (I wasn't a core-dev then) and Kubuntu as a whole 
> gave it up.

I don't think that should apply in this case, as the traditional upload
process will continue to run in parallel for some time to come (I'd go
so far as to say "for the foreseeable future").

I can't imagine that we would ever want to turn off the importer
entirely anyway. It will still be needed to import history from Debian
packages, unless we were in a position where we could guarantee that
every single Debian package was managed using a revision control system
we knew how to import in a repository we had permission to access. I
think this is an unlikely future.

> I'm not randomly fearful of this kind of change.  I've already been through 
> one round of "Trust me, it will be wonderful".

Trust me, other people will find it wonderful, and you can ignore it. If
you choose to pay attention to it at some point in the future, it will
be there for you.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]