UDD health check?

[James Westby]

On Tue, 13 Jul 2010 16:44:34 -0400, Barry Warsaw <barry at canonical.com> wrote:
> >Yes, and I'm not supposed to directly edit any of the source outside
> >of debian/, which is why the layout used by svn-buildpackage with only
> >debian/ in VCS resonates with me.

It is true that this is recommended practice. However, this is mainly
due to the fact that while the Debian package format keeps your changes
separate from the upstream source, it is very hard to review and modify
multiple patches that aren't in a patch system.

I was very strongly in favour of this approach until I had better tools
available.

Tools such as looms promise to allow the best of both worlds, managing
the patches to upstream, while still giving you the full source in
version control for things like...

> > Having said that, the full extracted
> >source is incredibly useful when I'm debugging - it's nice to be able
> >to diff a given source file between different package versions which
> >sometimes don't line up in a meaningful way with upstream VCS (because
> >they can be patched in the debian package).

... that.

Being able to "bzr blame" a file and see when a change was introduced,
regardless of whether it is a patch or an upstream change is great. I
think that a lot of people don't see that yet as they either avoid the
type of work where this action is necessary, or they have ingrained
workarounds due to the difficulties and inconsistencies we have now.

> This leads to my last comment.  While you're not *supposed* to touch anything
> outside of debian/, I think that if there were nice tools to convert back and
> forth from dvcs-lingo to patch-system-lingo, we'd have an even more powerful
> development system.

Agreed, and I would love to have this too. Maybe you'd like to chat on
list or in person next week and see if there are some easy things we can
do to move us in that direction?

Thanks,

James