Feedback on merging via bzr

[Scott Kitterman]

> On 28 January 2010 12:04, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu at kitterman.com> wrote:
>>> On 28 January 2010 06:14, Reinhard Tartler <siretart at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>> ...
>>>> Â - download the orig.tar.gz/orig.tar.bz2 files from debian
>>>>
>>>
>>> The branches are pristine-tar enabled you can just
>>> "$ bzr bd" them and a tarball will appear in your tarball's directory.
>>
>> Right, but which tarball? Â It's not always obvious. Â It's important
>> that
>> we md5sum match Debian [1]. Â In cases where we don't we end up having
>> to
>> do fake syncs once the differences between Debian and Ubuntu are
>> resolved.
>>
>
> Well just pick your favorite package branch and inspect it with $bzr
> visualise or the kde equivalent. The import is quite good.
>
> Original tarballs are taken from debian and are imported using
> pristine-tar into the "upstream" branch nick. Then the debian
> packaging is done on the "debian" branch nick which has upstream as
> ancestor and then the ubuntu is another branch nick which is diverging
> from the "debian" one again.
>
> So from the resulting lp:ubuntu/package you can branch off any
> upstream release, debian or ubuntu package release. And each revision
> has the corresponding pristine-tarball delta, such that all tarballs
> can be regenerated with identical checksums as in the debian archive.
>
> So the branch import has been engineered really well in this respect
> and we should not have fake syncs anymore.....
>
> This even scales to when the branches will get rebased ontop of the
> upstream releases, cause the pristine-tarball delta will be committed
> into a new branch nick based off upstream branch adding all the
> Makefile.in's and etc with the tarball delta.
>
> Can't remember either Karmic or Jaunty UDS had a video on this UDD
> master plan with all the explanations.

Then maybe the description of what is happening just needs to be improved
because as I said in the bug, it sure appears to be looking upstream and
getting the tarball from there before it checks Debian.  I understand the
theory, it isn't clear to me that's what's happening.

Scott K