[Pkg-bazaar-maint] builddeb questions

[James Westby]

Hi all,

I am working on import code for builddeb at the moment, and I wanted to
ask for help on a couple of questions.

The first is tagging, some of the code needs to be identify certain
revisions, so far I have only needed to identify pure upstream versions,
and so I used a tag of

  upstream-<version>

for those. Does that look right, or should it just be '<version>'?

I can see a need soon to identify released versions of the package, so
again I would like to design a tag scheme for this. It could just be the
version number, but there are things like uploads to different
distributions to consider. It would be possible to prefix the tag with
the name of the distribution the upload is on its way to (from the
changelog), but that makes it harder to actually find a version again.

Perhaps I should just assume that uploads to different distributions
(including things like etch-backports, stable-proposed-updates) go in a
different branch, so just the version number is used.

Has anyone got any bright ideas?

The other question is what to do on imports of packages. For a normal
package you end up with

  packaging  ----*----*----*----*
                /         /    /
  upstream ----*---------*----*

and for native packages you just let linear history. However there may
be some packages that go through a period of being native and back (one
way changes may be quite common). I am unsure of what to do in those
cases. Does it make sense to do the following


  packaging  ----*----*             *----*
                /    / \           /    /
  upstream ----*----*---*----*----*----*
                        ^         ^
                        |         |
  first native version_/           \_upstream of first non-native.


It makes the history a bit funny as the upstream branch contains
packaging work, but it seems like that is right, as that is a native
package.

It might be that this case is rare enough that I can just error out,
but if there is a scheme that makes sense then it shouldn't be hard to
implement.

Thanks,

James

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