[Pkg-mc-devel] Request to Join Project GNU Midnight Commander

Andreas Tille andreas at fam-tille.de
Wed Mar 16 16:23:31 UTC 2011


Hi Yury,

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 02:15:42PM +0100, Yury V. Zaytsev wrote:
> 
> Thanks for your offer. I haven't had a look at the bug that you
> mentioned yet, but I have no problem with you joining the project.
> 
> It would be nice to get help with packaging, but then please subscribe
> to pkg-mc-devel and let's discuss how we can progress together.

I just put this list in CC (not yet subscribed for stupid technical
difficulties with proxy or so).  Moreover I would like to express the
fact that I will definitely not a main contributor to mc packaging.
My main focus is the Debian Med project which basically consumes all
my spare time (I could spend even more).  However, I might lend a
helping hand for MC if it is urgently needed - as well I need MC as
my work horse urgently.
 
> The problem why we've fallen so far behind is that the svn workflow
> became really a PITA and the package history is really useless and
> polluted, so I wanted to migrate to git by reconstructing the proper
> history from snapshots, but this hasn't happened so far, because gitpkg
> which I decided to use initially had many issues that I fixed (kind of)
> just to discover that git-buildpackage does it differently and has none
> of this problems.

I can not pseak for the MC packaging team.  However from my experience
we have some silent agreement in other teams that packaging history can
be reconstructed from snapshots *if* needed.  There are quite rare cases
were you really need the complete history - so if it takes a certain
amount of your time to push the complete history into git this time is
most probably not very well spent compared to other more productive
tasks.  I don't say that history is not important - I just mean you
might spend some time for a formalism which might have no practical
relevance.

> Other than that I was waiting for 4.7.5.1 to get out of the door, now
> it's out, but it also means that a revamp of the whole package is needed
> and it doesn't make sense to do it before migrating to git. 

So my (outsiders !) advise would be: Creating the git repository based
on the current packaging (perhaps the version in stable + testing +
unstable to be able to work on security releases) and then proceed
with the new upstream version is perfectly appropriate.
 
> Sooo... it could be that I'll get to finishing it in the next few weeks.
> If you will then help me to go through the bugs and see if they are
> still relevant to the new packaging or can be fixed this will be already
> of huge help.

The "problem" I reported in #616196 is rather a minor one but my idea
was to save your time to care for those things.  As I said above: I
will not spend a lot of time in MC packaging, sorry.
 
> Otherwise, if you'd like to and you have time to help earlier with the
> migration we can also figure something out.
> 
> I don't want to block the development of the packaging just because I
> don't have time. If someone really has time and incentive to do better
> than me, let's figure something out.

I'm not a git expert and letting me fixing svn to git stuff is not a
sane idea.  As I said above: My suggestion would be to not block the
development by just not doing tasks which are not visible for the
user and not really necessary for the developers.  But that's just
me.

Kind regards

       Andreas. 

-- 
http://fam-tille.de



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