[Openstack-devel] Bug#712971: Bug#712971: New upstream release

[Thomas Goirand]

On 07/13/2013 08:33 PM, Wouter Bolsterlee wrote:
> You are using the Git tags to make Debian packages? That surprises me.

Yes I do. It's very convenient to do so, since I use git-buildpackage to
maintain my packages. This way it is also trivial to cherry-pick a
bugfix, or package up to a specific commit on github if I need to do so.
Also, I use xz compression out of git archive, which is nicer than
tarballs (xz compresses much better).

Over the years, I've found many upstream authors surprised as well,
though you shouldn't be scared of it. If I was to use your taralls, i
would store them in the Git on alioth.debian.org using pristine tar,
which is about the same thing, though it adds some (IMHO useless) work,
which I am very happy to get rid of. Using tags, I can store only a
single branch on Alioth, when pristine-tar imposes to store 3 branches.

FYI, the orig.tar.xz is made using:
git archive --prefix=$(DEBPKGNAME)-$(GIT_TAG)/ $(GIT_TAG) \
	| xz >../$(DEBPKGNAME)_$(VERSION).orig.tar.xz ;

The tag name comes from whatever version I have on top of my
debian/changelog:
DEBVERS ?= $(shell dpkg-parsechangelog | sed -n -e 's/^Version: //p')
VERSION ?= $(shell echo '$(DEBVERS)' \
	| sed -e 's/^[[:digit:]]*://' -e 's/[-].*//')
GIT_TAG ?= $(shell echo '$(VERSION)' | sed -e 's/~/_/')

> Official HappyBase upstream tarball releases are made available from
> PyPI. Tarballs found there are the ones that should be (re)packaged by
> distributors, not "random" tags checked out version control systems.

I don't package a "random tag", I package a tag which should normally
match what is used to build a tarball.

> I'd urge you to package the officially released versions. The way I see it,
> the source tree as pointed to the Git tag is the *source* of a released
> version on PyPI. The exact packaging depends on various factors, such as
> build system versions.

In what way the release tarball differ from the source on github?

> Btw, what you describe as "normal" tag names seems arbitrary. I have not
> encountered any widely accepted "standard" tagging workflows yet.

Well, "happybase-0.6" is weird, why don't you just use "0.6" instead? If
you don't want to do this, then never mind, I'll have to "git tag 0.6
happybase-0.6" each time you do a new tag, so that it works with my
workflow. However, notice that the tarball from github also agree with
me, and they link to a happybase-happybase-0.6.tar.gz, which is kind of
weird.

> Anyway, thanks for making HappyBase easily available for users. Please
> keep up the good work. :)

I am committed to maintain it for the next ~ 5 years at least (if Jessie
is released in a year and a half, then it will only be EOL 3 years
later, which is 4.5 years). Do not hesitate to ping me if you do a new
release, and wish me to update the Debian package. Otherwise it might
need to wait that a reverse-dependency needs it, or that I notice on my
Q/A page that the package is out of date. It usually takes me only a few
minutes to do so if there's no major change, or new dependencies.

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)