Feedback on merging via bzr

[Andrew SB]

Thanks for writing this Scott. It touches on a couple things I've been
meaning to write about myself.

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 10:45 PM, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> wrote:
> 1.  The most important change would be to have some kind of a wrapper for
> getting the source.  It would be nice to have a script that would download
> branches for the common ancestor, current Ubuntu, and current Debian branches,
> and do the proposed merge.  Without local access to the different versions of
> the package, it is very difficult to know if you've got a correct merge.

I think this is an important point. Especially with MoM not updating
correctly, we really need something to help ease people into these new
methods. I think a grab-merge like script would go a long way to
helping both simplify the repetitive work as well as introduce people
to UDD methods.

I've personally been using a hackish shell script that I'd be
embarrassed to distributed. It basically does:

bzr init-repo $PACKAGE
cd $PACKAGE
bzr branch lp:ubuntu/$PACKAGE $PACKAGE-ubuntu
bzr branch lp:debian/$PACKAGE $PACKAGE-debian
bzr branch $PACKAGE-ubuntu working-tree
cd working-tree
bzr merge-package ../$PACKAGE-debian

Then uses Bryce's merge_changelog script and 'dch -i -m' to handle the
repetitive changelog stuff.

Ideally, the script would also produce something along the lines of
MoM's REPORT, listing the conflicts and giving instructions on how to
proceed.

> In the old method, I would debuild -S (-sa if needed) -v and have a package
> ready for uploading.
>
> bzr builddeb -S -- -v4.6-1ubuntu1
>
> Now this one looks easy, but has the hidden trap of bzr builddeb providing
> only -S from dpkg-buildpackage and requiring an extra flag to pass other
> options to dpkg-buildpackage ("--").  I think this needs a rethink [2].

I didn't know that was even possible. I've been using

bzr bd --builder="debuild -S -v4.6-1ubuntu1"

I very much agree with:

> 3.  As mentioned, the bzr builddeb interface and documentation needs work.
> Ideally it would act similarly to debuild and pass all the dpkg-buildpackage
> options to it without special flags.  Yet another interface that is almost the
> same is problematic.

- Andrew Starr-Bochicchio