Switching KDE packaging to git

[Modestas Vainius]

Hello,

On antradienis 13 Liepa 2010 01:12:03 Mark Purcell wrote:
> Seems like a lot of options and moving parts for the maintenance of
> kde-extras packages.
> 
> In kde-extras we generally have new upstream releases with sometimes a
> handful of Debian specific patches, sometimes pulling something early from
> upstream.

Well, my original mail has never been about kde-extras. Unlike qt4-x11 or KDE, 
kde-extras are released individually as separate rather small entities. 
Compare that to 400+ mb big qt4-x11 or 22 huge source packages of KDE.

If I was to start packaging kde-extras app from scratch, I would definitely 
choose the same workflow I currently use for ktorrent/konversation, i.e. 
upstream + packaging with patching in quilt + pristine-tar. upstream branches 
are really useful when they are manageable despite some caveats with quilt 
patches in this workflow (the next release of dpkg-dev will make it easy to 
workaround them). However, this 'upstream branch' workflow does not scale in 
cases like qt4-x11 (due to its size) or official KDE modules (due to the 
number of upstream branches to update for each new release and their 
cumulative size). 

"upstream + packaging with patching in quilt + pristine-tar" is basically what  
git buildpackage supports. At least, git import-orig makes it easy to import 
and manage upstream & pristine-tar branches. However, I do not agree with
`git buildpackage` tagging conventions (e.g. that it replaces '~', which git 
does not support in tags, with '.', how uninformative tag annotations are 
etc.) so I tend to avoid it.

> svn-buildpackage manages this use case without lots of command line foo,
> without manual extraction of the upstream tarball or manually extracting 
> the tarball into the repository.

> Am I missing something, or is git too powerful for the use case we have
> with kde-extras?

I have never used svn-buildpackage but I believe git-buildpackage is as easy 
to use as svn-buildpackage if you want to use a wrapper and accept all its 
conventions (which I don't). That qt4-x11.git README.source was written with 
bare git in mind so it might be a bit verbose.


-- 
Modestas Vainius <modestas at vainius.eu>
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