UDD health check?

[Barry Warsaw]

On Jul 13, 2010, at 01:23 PM, Elliot Murphy wrote:

>On Tue, Jul 13, 2010 at 11:08 AM, Martin Pool <mbp at canonical.com>
>wrote:
>> I asked Barry how he was finding the UDD experience
><snip>
>> Any other suggestions/wishes/hates?
>
>I have found UDD very pleasant for doing merges from debian to ubuntu,
>and I *love* using merge proposals to ask for changes to be sponsored
>into Ubuntu. When I want to put a python or erlang package into Ubuntu
>via debian, I end up needing to use SVN and svn-buildpackage which is
>a completely different world/workflow from UDD and that difference can
>be a bit overwhelming at first.

Contrary to what my morning irc ranting might imply, I have to echo Elliot's
enthusiasm for UDD, in the context of Ubuntu development.  For me, it's an
absolute joy to bzr branch lp:ubuntu/whatever, hack, commit, push, mp, review,
etc.  There are a few rough edges of course, but they're not insurmountable.
I do intend to submit bugs on them, but just haven't gotten 'round to it yet.

I would love to get the loom/pipeline story nailed down.  I still find looms
a more natural ui to work with, even though I can appreciate Aaron et al's
preference for the pipeline model.

Similar to Elliot, where UDD breaks down is in interfacing with Debian
development, which I find I have to do quite often.  I suppose that's
understandable given the leading 'U' in the acronym, but it would still be
nice if things could be easier.

As an example: I'm trying to get two of my spinoff Python packages into
Ubuntu, via Debian.  They are packaged in neither atm.  I'm the upstream
maintainer and the projects are hosted on Launchpad, so it starts off easy
enough by creating a branch of trunk, and loomifying the work branch.  I
create a thread for Debian development, use stdeb to create the initial
debian/ directory, then create a thread for Ubuntu.  This latter is what I
build the source package for the PPA from.

This is a nice arrangement because as I modify the trunk (and make non-Debuntu
releases), I can pull the trunk into the bottom thread, up-thread --auto and
be ready to spin a new PPA (yes, I know, I haven't yet started to use
build-from-branch).

The debian thread is less useful though, because what the DPMT wants is *just*
the debian/ directory in their svn, and that workflow is completely
different.  The last update I made, I resorted to rsync'ing the debian
directory to an svn checkout from alioth.  Not fun.

In summary: UDD is awesome, and I hope you keep making it awesomer. :)

-Barry
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-distributed-devel/attachments/20100713/52e6c0bd/attachment.pgp