build-from-branch into the primary archive

[Colin Watson]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 03:03:08PM -0500, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On Feb 17, 2011, at 10:33 AM, Steve Langasek wrote:
> >  How do we distinguish commits that ought to be built from those that
> >  don't?  One way is to say we'll rebuild on things that add a new debian
> >  changelog (with a higher version.) Some people commit changes with a
> >  series target of 'unreleased' and we could then just actually assemble the
> >  package when that flips to be a real series.
> >
> >Either there needs to be a separate adjunct branch that gets pushed to
> >*from* lp:ubuntu/$package to trigger builds, or this needs to only build
> >when a new version (previously unknown to the archive) has been tagged on
> >the branch.  A lot of time has been spent on socializing the idea that we
> >can use the existing lp:ubuntu branches to stage changes, and upload to the
> >archive for building only when we're ready; to have some branches diverge
> >from this behavior and start building for the archive for each commit, even
> >if someone has nominated the branch in question for some sort of whitelist,
> >would result in a number of wrongly published packages.
> >
> >I think the 'bzr mark-uploaded' interface, which sets the appropriate
> >version tag, is the natural fit for this.
> 
> Observing my recent use, I think there are two things that together indicate
> that a particular source branch revision is ready to be uploaded.  First, the
> changelog entry's series is correct (i.e. natty, -proposed, etc.), *and* the
> version number does not have a ~ in it.

I'm with others on this who find tagging a more explicit and safer
interface.  ~ in changelogs isn't going to be a sufficient heuristic:

  $ grep-aptavail -FVersion \~ -nsPackage | wc -l
  1386

Even if you exclude cases where ~ is part of the upstream version (a
common way to indicate a pre-release):

  $ grep-aptavail -rFVersion '.*-.*\~' -nsPackage | wc -l
  39

~ was introduced so that it could be used in real versions in the
archive - it wasn't meant as just an unreleased marker.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]