[PKG-Openstack-devel] Please don't remove gbp.conf from openstack packaging repos

[Thomas Goirand]

On 11/05/2017 12:54 AM, Jeremy Bicha wrote:
> I think this commit is wrong. There should be a debian/gbp.conf that
> specifies whether pristine-tar is to be used for the project or not
> (some Debian repos do not use it). Also the debian-branch and
> upstream-branch fields are very important if you're not using the
> defaults (master and upstream, respectively). These values cannot
> really be set by developers in their personal configuration files.
> 
> https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/openstack/services/sahara.git/commit/?id=3549309
> 
> Thanks,
> Jeremy Bicha

Hi,

No, we don't use pristine-tar in the OpenStack team in Debian, the
biggest reason being that it's a broken system. See my last upload of
Alembic being broke (I forwarded it to the team's list), and the CI that
the maintainers of pristine-tar have put in place to try to fix what
they know already is not really fixable. See Antonio's blog at [1].

We don't use "master" for packaging, as this is a branch from upstream.
Instead, we use debian/<openstack-release>. The only issue that there
is, is that gbp complain about non-default branch. Meaning that a
developer has to set in its ~/.gbp.conf:

[DEFAULT]
ignore-branch = True

or use the relevant option when using gbp buildpackage. This is much
better this way, because we don't have to do fixes to debian/gbp.conf on
each release of OpenStack, which would be 160 changes every 6 months.
One doesn't have to use gbp, you can use sbuild directly too, so not
having a non-mandatory configuration file makes a lot of sense.

Also, using things this way forces gbp users to check if the orig.tar.gz
is generated properly in ../build-area, or downloaded from the Debian
archive manually if the file existed previously (otherwise, gbp
complains and exists). This is the correct workflow, as otherwise, gbp
automatically generates the tarball out of a tag, which can be an issue
if it already exists in the archive (then the upload will be rejected).

All of this has been discussed at large during the Debconf 17 sprint in
Montreal with people from the team. I find it not appropriate to wake up
*after* we uploaded everything to Debian. At most, you should have
noticed it 3 months ago, when Daniel did the change on all repositories
when we were in Montreal. Now is too late, after all was uploaded to
Sid, and we're starting functional testing.

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)

[1] http://softwarelivre.org/terceiro/blog/pristine-tar-updates