ubuntu: branches lacking history with upstream branches

[Jelmer Vernooij]

Hi Barry,

On 09/22/2011 05:14 PM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> 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.
Why would this be better than actually having all of the history there? 
It seems to me like that would mostly just add extra overhead because 
you have to fetch two branches rather than one.

I use "bzr merge-upstream" to merge new upstream versions into the 
packaging branches of bzr, samba4, heimdal and various other projects .  
See for example the ubuntu:bzr branch (although that seems to be out of 
date at the moment).

>   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.
The practice of versioning debian/ only mostly seems to happen if the 
VCS used is SVN. Even then, there are a couple of teams that import the 
full upstream source into SVN.

I think I've seen more Git repositories that include the full source 
than repositories that don't.

Cheers,

Jelmer