[pkg-fso-maint] git-import-orig vs. upstream’s real branch

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi Guido,

I’m trying to find a good way to manage packages in git where upstream
uses git as well, and I share that repository for my Debian packaging. I
see that the git-buildpackage tools are very suitable for maintaining
packages where you only import the released source tarballs from
upstream (into the “upstream” branch), but do not track the upstream’s
git branch (say, “upstream-master”) itself.

I found http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/notes/debian/git.html
section “Debian and Upstream Combined” with some suggestions. Basically,
Russ suggests to have upstream-master in the git repository, but do not
actually use it for Debian stuff. Instead, import the tarballs to
upstream as usual and base the Debian branch on that. Note that the
tarballs usually differ from upstream’s master branch (think automake
files).

Is that an sensible approach, in your opinion?

What I’m missing here is the connection between upstream-master and
upstream. I’m no git expert, but would it make sense to run
# git checkout upstream
# git merge -s ours release/the-version
where release/the-version is the tag on the upstream-master branch,
indicating where the tarball was created from? This would tell git that
the just imported tarball contains all patches from upstream-master, up
to this point. Is that sensible? If so, would it be useful to add
support for this to git-import-orig (e.g. a --based-upon flag)?

Also, do you have any suggestions on how to best handle changes in the
Debian branch that should end up as quilt patches? Currently, we just
let git maintain the quilt files, but I wonder if there isn’t anything
smarter? Maybe something like branches per change, which would be turned
into quilt files by git-buildpackage?

Thanks for your comments,
Joachim


-- 
Joachim "nomeata" Breitner
Debian Developer
  nomeata at debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C
  JID: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata
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