Proposal for branch restructuring for intrepid

[Matthew East]

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 7:18 PM, Richard A. Johnson
<nixternal at kubuntu.org> wrote:
> On Monday 31 March 2008, Jordan Mantha wrote:
> [...]
> | I think this is a good idea. In the least you can have a script that
> | creates the translated .xml when you create the source package if it's a
> | pain to do it at actual .deb build time.
>
> Pain to do it at the actual .deb build time because we tend to get back XML tags
> that have been translated as well which requires us to manually fix these so
> the files validate.
>
> But we know where the translations are in LP, so it isn't difficult to leave
> them out of the branches and just import and fix the translations locally for
> packaging. With Kubuntu, I don't upload my translations until the very end,
> ensuring I have as many as possible, which is usually not that much typically.
> So the original issue isn't really that big of a deal with Kubuntu more so than
> it is with Ubuntu and the mass amount of translation love they get.

I have a cunning plan which should work better and which will permit
us to do it at build time: fix the errors directly in the po file.
I've tried this already for the last gutsy upload of ubuntu-docs and
it is easy to do.

I've also been discussing with the Rosetta devs a way to allow us to
upload fixed po files to Rosetta so that the next time we download the
translations, the same error isn't repeated.

> | I like this option. It should make a lot more sense to contributors.
> | Only question is about maintaining common material for derivative
> | branches. Right now I just check common/ and libs/ in the ubuntu-hardy
> | branch for changes to merge into the edubuntu branch. If the the various
> | common/ and libs/  directories where to be merged how do you think this
> | would effect derivatives? My guess would be that it might make things a
> | bit more complicated but really wouldn't matter much. Derivatives might
> | just end up shipping more than they need.
>
> Can you do the external branching stuff like Subversion does? We do it in both
> Debian and KDE, but I don't know with Bazaar how that would or could be done.
> That way there we all share an external common/ or libs/ source between the
> branches.

We could have this stuff in a separate branch, but I don't really like
that idea - I like the idea of being able to get a single branch in
order to build a source package.

I think the better option is simply to have certain files in "libs"
which vary between derivatives, and others that don't. The very
process of "merging" presupposes that there is the ability to preserve
differences between two branches, while pulling in changes which are
desired.

-- 
Matthew East
http://www.mdke.org
gnupg pub 1024D/0E6B06FF