[Pkg-mc-devel] Reorganisation of MC packaging team

[Yury V. Zaytsev]

Hi,

So here I am with the technical comments...

On Sun, 2012-02-19 at 17:45 +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:

> Yury told me about his plans to move the repository to Git which would
> be perfectly fine for me but nothing has happened since then. Yuri,
> could you please confirm that you are currently planing to work on
> this or if we should rather declare mc as unmaintained and need to do
> some action. That's not against you, because you are free how you will
> spend your time, but if your time does not permit to work on this it
> is better to declare it to others in the (not existing) team and
> perhaps to orphan the package.

Please take action as needed.

I have almost came up with a way of reliably reconstructing the history
from snapshots, since svn history is in an unusable state, but it was
mostly important for me to see how both the packaging and mc were
developing over time (as I was involved with upstream) and why certain
decisions have been made...

> As far as I can see from this bug report several Ubuntu people are
> interested in MC.  So I would suggest the following:
> 
>    1. Drop history of SVN packaging and simply start a Git
>       reporistory from scratch (I'm no git expert, I'm just following
>       the plan from Yuri).

...so if someone wants to start afresh with proper git-buildpackage
structure I'm all for it.

> 2. Inject the latest upstream version into the new repository and
>       verify which patches from previous Debian packaging should be
>       applied.

If I were starting from scratch I would have taken it as an opportunity
to make brand new packaging basing upon dh7.

Historically, the packaging was done with cdbs, but there were problems
with it in the past, so now that dh7 is getting better and better every
day I would go for it.

> 3. Try to form a Debian-Ubuntu-whatever maintainer team around mc

+1.

> I would love if Ubuntu people which are obviosely active would try to
> work in the same VCS as the Debian packaging is done.

+1.

> Any better plan to work on this goal is welcome as well.  I really
> feel a big need for maintaining mc properly straight into Debian to
> enable a simple migration to any derivative - mc is to important to
> make its maintenance a pain for several people by reinventing
> everything from scratch.

Let me add to that:

When it became clear that neither Patrick, nor Denis are active anymore
and I took over the maintenance, I have spent a considerable amount of
time triaging Ubuntu bugs and importing / upstreaming Ubuntu-specific
patches that have been accumulated while the package was unmaintained.

Finally, all of them have been dropped and autosync from Debian was
enabled. Now, if you start maintaining the package in Ubuntu separately
once again, it will soon enough diverge significantly from Debian...

So I would strongly recommend trying to work with Debian first and keep
Ubuntu version on autosync in order to prevent the duplication of
efforts and lots of extra work to be done in the future.

-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev