Battle royale: bzr vs. quilt

[Max Bowsher]

On 07/12/10 16:40, James Westby wrote:
> We used the maxim "the branch should contain the same as you get with
> apt-get source", which in the case of quilt v3 packages is patches applied.

In a previous version of dpkg, that resulted in patches applied, but no
.pc directory. Instead you just got a .dpkg-source-applied marker file.

That was moderately sane.

However, now dpkg generates a full .pc directory including all the Quilt
backup copies of unmodified files. Updating these correctly whilst
making any change to the branch is infeasibly difficult to expect anyone
to tolerate.

> We need looms or something to maintain the spirit of the maxim (one of
> the motivators of quilt v3 was to give people a tree with patches
> applied so that they can just hack, we want to mirror that), while still
> being able to produce sensible diffs for Debian.
> 
> I think fixing this is urgent, as the current mandated workflow is
> opposite to people's aesthetic sense, so they will never be happy with
> it, and so won't embrace udd. As the proportion of quilt v3 packages
> increase, so will the proportion of people using UDD who will encounter
> this and likely dislike what they find.

How far away are we from loomified UDD? I think we need a quick fix in
the short term, because v3 source package branches with any patches are
pretty much worthless when it comes to merging a new upstream version at
the moment.

I see two families of potential quick fix:

1) Revert to keeping branches in patches-unapplied state. Make this work
comfortably with the rest of the tools by having the UDD importer
synthesize a debian/source/local-options file containing
"unapply-patches" in UDD branches, and use --skip-patches when unpacking.

2) Keep the branches in patches-applied form, but omit the .pc, and
require that some manner of fixup is run which rebuilds the .pc metadata
for quilt after checking out a branch.


Max.

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