Deprecating the wiki-based Packaging Guide

[Martin Pitt]

Barry Warsaw [2013-01-08 14:59 -0500]:
> IMHO, the main obstacle is the success rate of the package importer.

In my experience that doesn't matter. If a package doesn't have a
current UDD branch, then there's always the good old apt-get
source/edit.

IMHO the main obstacle is that UDD does not work well for common use
cases.  I find myself not exactly liking UDD even for the (vast
majority of) packages where the branches are up to date, mostly
because its design is a bit upside down: It has pretty much perfect
VCS behaviour for precisely those bits which we do not want to change
in a distro: the original upstream source. For changing them, we need
to use quilt and debian/patches/, which is the very same approach than
with plain apt-get source, except that UDD imposes a lot of extra
overhead: I have to take care to pre-apply patches, add/track all the
extra .pc stuff, do things three times in a row until the pre-applied
patches stop conflicting with the operation that I'm currently doing
(new upstream source, editing or adding a patch), etc.

A few years ago I set up a package (calibre) to use "proper" VCS with
threads instead of patches; that worked much better and much more
consistently, but I gave it up because nobody else in the world knew
how to use that branch. Chicken-egg problem.

Also, UDD is incompatible with having upstream develop on Launchpad as
the branches share no history and thus you can't just "bzr merge
lp:trunk" for a new upstream version, cherrypick changes, etc.
This breaks a lot of the reasons why one wants to use a VCS in the
first place.

Now, those two things (patching packages and working with packages
whose upstream is on LP) is, or at least had been for many years, my
bread and butter of what I do in Ubuntu. This might be different for
other people who mostly work on packaging or native packages; UDD
works well for both cases, and I like those branches myself as well
for those cases.

But these are the reasons why the desktop team doesn't use UDD: one
half of our packages has upstreams on LP (indicators, Unity,
software-center, etc.), and the main exercise on other half (GNOME) is
patching and upstream version updates, not changing packaging.

So in summary, I think the packaging documentation should certainly
explain UDD, but at least point out that some packages are maintained
differently (point out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Bzr, the
Vcs-Bzr: field, and apt-get source).

Thanks,

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