[Pkg-octave-devel] Concurrent maintenance of the Octave packaging

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

2011/10/5 John W. Eaton <jwe at octave.org>:
> On  5-Oct-2011, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
>
> | How about having two separate packaging branches in hg? Say,
> | packaging-stable and packaging-default. The merges should happen
> | regularly in order to make the following inclusion lattice diagram
> | usually true:
> |
> |     packaging-default
> |      /           \
> |     /             \
> | default         packaging-stable
> |     \             /
> |      \           /
> |         stable
> |
> | I.e. regularly merge stable onto default and onto packaging-stable
> | *and* regularly merge both default and packaging-stable onto
> | packaging-default. Merges are fairly cheap if they're done frequently
> | and incrementally, so I don't think this is an excessive amount of
> | extra work.
> |
> | The packaging branches should contain the debian/ and whatever .spec
> | stuff seems useful (and similar packaging information for Windows and
> | Mac OS X?). The official Debian packaging can simply mirror the
> | packaging-stable branch in Savannah and we can regularly push on that
> | branch whatever changes the various distribution packagers deem
> | necessary.
> |
> | On the Octave side, we can regularly maintain the packaging-default
> | branch so that the packaging is "always ready", so that when a new
> | major Octave release happens, we can use what has been collaboratively
> | maintained there as the basis of a new Debian packaging.
>
> I'm probably missing something, but I don't understand the need for
> the packaging-{stable,default} branches. Are those in Octave hg
> archive?  And separate from the current stable and default branches?
> I don't understand why they need to be separate from the normal stable
> and default branches.

Perhaps I was thinking too Debianly when I suggested this. The
proposal was to address Sébastien's concerns about having tarballs
corrupted by dirty debian/ directories. Yes, these would be separate
branches in hg in Savannah. This repository structure is supposed to
mimic how Debian recommends handling a repository structure when using
a DVCS to track upstream changes. The usual idea is to have the
upstream source in one branch and repository+packaging in a debian
branch. It's explained here, although it's peculiar to Debian
packaging with git, the basic ideas still apply:

    http://honk.sigxcpu.org/projects/git-buildpackage/manual-html/gbp.intro.html#GBP.REPOSITORY

So the idea is that the Debian packaging can simply be a clone of the
Savannah repo. This would make it easier to share changes between the
packagers and Octave. This has the side effect of implementing my
plans to rid the world of the git menace, starting with the Debian
packaging of Octave. ;-)

The need for *two* packaging branches is that Debian only releases
from stable (and so should everyone else), but the packaging doesn't
necessarily have to be the same for stable and default, so each
packaging branch can address the needs of each main Octave branch.

I don't know what the usual way to do rpm packaging is. I've only done
very basic rpm packaging myself for privately-distributed rpms.
Perhaps Jussi can comment more on this.

- Jordi G. H.