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

[John W. Eaton]

On  6-Oct-2011, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

| 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.

Separate from the current stable and default, just to add the debian
files?  I can see why we would need different debian files for Octave
stable and default, but not why they would need to be separate from
the stable and default branches that we currently maintain (if that's
the case; sorry for being dense here).

| 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

I read that, but I'm not sure I'm following it.

Anyway, why can't we just work with the repo+packaging branch in
Octave?  Normally we can ignore the packaging files, and they won't be
included in any tarball, so running "make dist" will get you a "pristine
upstream tarball" that does not include any debian files.  Running
some other target like "make dpkg-dist" would generate the pristine
tar file and then create a Debian package it up and wrap it with a
ribbon and a bow.

It's that last target I want to be able to run at least occasionally,
just to ensure that we haven't broken the basics of the packaging.  I
don't expect to be releasing debian packages, or that I will
necessarily know how to fix the problems that come up without some
Debian expertise.  I just want to enable more frequent testing so we
don't go for long periods of time without being able to build a Debian
package for Octave.

jwe