RFC: Moving kubuntu packaging branches to pkg-kde git

[Philip Muskovac]

Hi pkg-kde team,

as we're currently in another rather painful package merge cycle, and with kf5 
and plasma next just outside the door we've been talking about how we could 
move our packaging branches over to debian git to help with the merging and 
the rather large about of work duplication on both sides.

For the large amount of SC/KF5/plasma packages we use a mostly scripted 
workflow which we would like to keep using, so we came up with this git branch 
layout:

- master: has the shared packaging and targets the latest upstream (beta?) 
release (which should really be everything as long as something doesn't cause 
a problem for the other team)
- <series> (e.g. unstable, utopic): has any distribution specific changes that 
cannot be kept in master (like specific patches, recommends/suggests changes 
for archive reasons)
and is used to generate the actual archive packages for that specific series.

While I believe that this mostly should work fine, at this point I'm not quite 
sure how to manage the changelog. OdyX suggested generating it from the git 
commit messages which I think would work out best, as we could then keep our 
respective distribution changelogs and only share the change messages.

A while ago I talked with maxy about commit access permissions, but for now I 
don't believe this would be an issue as most kubuntu packagers already are 
members of pkg-kde.

For now, I would propose trying this shared repository idea out with the new 
kf5 and later also the plasma packages as you don't have any repositories for 
those yet.

Would this be something you would consider? 
It would help us a lot as this would prevent us spending weeks to merge our 
packages and you would already have the changes for a new release in master 
when you plan to switch to it.

Cheers,
Philip Muškovac (yofel)
Kubuntu Developer