ubuntu: branches lacking history with upstream branches

[Barry Warsaw]

On Sep 22, 2011, at 07:08 PM, Martin Pool wrote:

>lp:indicator-power is one example, and the desktop team actually
>maintain an unofficial packaging branch that does share history:
>lp:~ubuntu-desktop/indicator-power/ubuntu

At the moment, gtimelog is another.  What I've done recently is to first do a
release from trunk, i.e. lp:gtimelog, push the new tarball to Launchpad and
PyPI, then in ubuntu:gtimelog, I do `bzr merge-upstream` and build the Ubuntu
release from that.

It's not perfect, but it works.  One problem seemed to be a weird lag in the
debian/watch url between what I was seeing in my browser, where the 0.7.0
release was visible, but uscan took a while before it saw the new tarball.  I
didn't quite understand that, but wasn't in a desperate hurry to push the new
Ubuntu version anyway, so I just waited a bit.

It would certainly be more useful to have ubuntu:gtimelog share history with
lp:gtimelog, but I think it would be best in that case if ubuntu:gtimelog only
version controlled the debian directory.  This would more closely mirror how
packages are managed in Debian.  However, I'd *still* want
`bzr branch ubuntu:gtimelog` to give me the full source.  I wonder if nested
branches are the answer here.  One trick would be that I'd only want the
source from the upstream branch based on a particular tag.  E.g. I might have
unreleased changes in lp:gtimelog, but I want to base ubuntu:gtimelog (and the
source package built from it) to work off the 0.7.0 tag or some such.

-Barry