On Sat, Jul 04, 2009 at 10:41:53PM +0200, Joachim Breitner wrote: > Hi zack,
Howdy (but note that devscripts, including debcheckout, is maintained
by way more people than me alone ;-))
> One option, which I find appealing, is to only store the contents of the
> debian/ directory in the VCS. This would be most useful if there is
> some support for it in debcheckout. In human pseudo code, I could
> imagine debcheckout following these steps:
>
> * debcheckout, after getting the repository, detects this layout
> (absense of a debian/ directory, presence of control and changelog
> files in the top directory)
> * If detected, it gets an upstream tarball. Possible locations are:
> - current working directory, if named as expected (....orig.tar.gz)
> - the debian archive
> - whatever is referenced in ./watch
> * It extracts the tarball
> * It moves the repository checkout to debian/ inside the checked-out
> sources.
>
> What do you think? Does it make sense? Would you accept a patch
> implementing that?
First of all, I must confess that I don't see the advantage. Are you
doing all that only to gain the storage of the _content_ of debian/
instead of having a repository that contains debian/ itself? If this
is the case, I noticed that what you are proposing will defeat the
implicit API of many devscripts, which expect a debian/ dir inside
`pwd`. ... and in fact you are asking debcheckout to recreate that
layout: it looks like _very_ twisted to me.
If, on the contrary, what you are trying to achieve is to not store
upstream sources but only debian/ stuff, then for some $VCS you
already have support for that in package building tool. For instance,
svn-buildpackage supports the so called "debian only" layout which
does exactly that. Using such a tool, the work flow you request is
already available executing a couple of commands:
- debcheckout foo
- uscan --force-download
- # move downloaded stuff in ../tarballs/
And you're done.
2 comments:
1) this is because svn-buildpackage has knowledge of some "debian
only" layout. Does your $VCS support, with its package building
tool, anything like that? If not, there is probably where to add
the support you need
2) how to actually retrieve the orig tarball is a tricky
business. uscan is a possibility, the "get-orig-source" of
debian/rules is another. How to find an entry point which does the
right thing is a complex subject by his own, which probably
requires some adjustments in policy too.
Concluding, as I see things now, it doesn't look like a good idea to
me to implement what you asked, ... but I might have misunderstood it
:-)
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
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