Giving developers access to requeue package imports [Was: Ubuntu Platform developers BOF session?]

[Stéphane Graber]

On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 07:24:49PM -0500, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On Nov 13, 2013, at 04:51 PM, Stéphane Graber wrote:
> 
> >Well, to be fair my fallback process when not doing UDD is:
> > - pull-lp-source <package> <series>
> > - cd */
> > - bzr init && bzr add && bzr commit -m "current"
> > - Do whatever changes, commit when needed, revert, ...
> > - bzr bd -S
> > - dput
> 
> For my UDD branches, I always branch them into a shared repository, under the
> assumption that if I've grabbed the package once, the next time I'll have most
> of the revisions already downloaded, so the branching is quicker.
> 
> I guess pull-lp-source essentially fills the roll of `chdist apt-get series
> blah` although the former has a bit more flexibility in how you specify the
> exact branch you want.
> 
> >Which based on what you described about commitless UDD seems pretty much
> >identical with the significant improvement that I don't have to grab the
> >whole branch on top of that :)
> 
> Could be, although I have to type less :).
> 
> >I could also push and share that temporary branch with others and
> >there'd be no downside to this since I wouldn't be able to merge that
> >branch back into the UDD one anyway.
> 
> For out-of-date branches, I think they'd be roughly equivalent.  For
> up-to-date branches, not getting the UDD branch means you wouldn't be able to
> merge propose, which also makes sponsoring more difficult (patches/debdiffs
> are like dead things, branches are alive! :).
> 
> >At least for me, UDD without commit rights, would mean lost granularity
> >in some changes I'm doing in the archive, for example for some of the
> >edubuntu packages I've had dozens of commits before an actual upload,
> >and I quite enjoy having that present in the UDD history, loosing that
> >ability would be loosing much of UDD's benefits.
> 
> I'm a little unclear if you mean that you do pushes to the parent UDD branch
> for each of those commits.  Doesn't that mean that the UDD branch won't mirror
> the contents of the source package?  If so, is that a good thing?  Or maybe
> you only push once the package is dput'd.
> 
> I am concerned about workflows where the UDD branch is not a reflection of the
> contents of the source package, modulo short importer lag.
> 
> It's too bad there's no way to capture those non-pushed intermediate commits
> in the source package you upload, such that the importer would apply them, and
> they would be preserved in the master UDD branch.
> 
> -Barry

I push those commits to the main branch (ubuntu:<package>) as I go.
It's true that the head of the branch doesn't reflect the source
package, however the latest tag does, so that's not a real concern.

What I like is that when I have a few simple changes or fixes that don't
seem to warrant an upload on their own either because of a very long
build time or because I know someone else is going to merge the package
from Debian in the next few days, I can just commit stuff in there, add
an UNRELEASED changelog entry and let whoever does the next major change,
just pick up my changes at the same time.

That also means people don't need to go looking for MP before uploading
something as the change is already right there in the branch, all they
need to do is to add theirs and upload.


I've noticed that I'm not the only one doing that, I know that at least Steve
is doing something similar with some packages ;)


-- 
Stéphane Graber
Ubuntu developer
http://www.ubuntu.com
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