[Aptitude-devel] hacking aptitude/release process

[Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo]

Hi,

2012/1/22 Daniel Hartwig <mandyke at gmail.com>:
> so I have investigated the development/release process for aptitude
> since the change to git:

Great investigation, I was wondering about that myself :-)

>  $ git tag NNN
>  [produce ../aptitude_NNN.orig.tar.gz]
>  $ git checkout debian
>  $ git-import-orig ../aptitude_NNN.orig.tar.gz

Isn't this possible with a regular merge from master into debian branch?

(Not that I have anything against that, due to my limited
understanding I am just wondering why is it a better solution).

> The debian changelog and other files are always accurate to the
> current state of debian/upstream branch.  Currently what has happened
> is we updated the changelog even though the changes refered to are not
> merged yet, thus the debian branch is in an inconsistent state.  This
> is not a problem for now, though in the future I shall avoid updating
> the changelog for changes on master until after they are merged (the
> git-import-orig step).

Yep, good to know.

> Production of the .orig.tar.gz is a bit hairy.  It contains files
> which do not appear in a clean tree of branch master (generated by
> autogen.sh):
>
>  aclocal.m4
>  ChangeLog
>  config.guess
>  config.h.in
>  config.sub
>  configure
>  depcomp
>  ...
>
> and does not contain some other files which are in the master branch:
>
>  autogen.sh
>  po/Makevars.template
>  po/POTFILES.ignore
>  ...
>
> If anyone has any clues there they are appreciated -- is there a
> makefile or debian/rules target to do this that I am missing?

I have a quite limited undestanding of autotools as well, but anyway I
will comment.  I think that it's a multi-faceted issue:

- I think that autogen.sh creates configure, config.{guess,sub} and
possibly aclocal.m4, depcomp.  Probably DBurrows didn't want
autogenerated files in the "upstream" ("master") branch, but wanted
them on debian branch, to create the .deb more easily.  So maybe the
process is git-master -> generate stuff && pack orig.tar.gz ->
git-debian.  Do I make it understandable?

- Same for po/ files, probably they are preprocessed from the
"upstream" repo to the to-be-packaged one.

But of course I don't know the details.  Hopefully somebody else does.


Cheers.