[DRE-maint] Thoughts about switching to svn-buildpackage layout 2

[Vincent Fourmond]

Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> If I understand things correctly, the problem you are trying to solve is
> that having a full checkout is painful because it eats a lot of disk
> space (and I agree that's a problem, since I'm writing this mail on my
> asus eee pc ;)

  There is also another advantage: the debian/ dir would then reside not
in a subdirectory of libfoo-ruby/ but directly in libfoo-ruby, which
makes it more user-friendly, and one level less in the hierarchy to go
from root to where one works.

> I'm not sure that the layout 2 really solves this problem. Why are full
> checkouts so big? Because of all the tags. Do we really need them? I'm
> not sure. Maybe we could simply remove "old" tags. If someone wants to
> find out something about a very old version of a package, he/she can
> still checkout an older revision.

  I vote against: the whole point of the tags is to get a clear picture
of when the package was uploaded, and be sure to work on the right
version should a stable upload be necessary. It is of course still
possible to work with an earlier checkout of the repository and fix the
things there, but it is painful and error-prone.

> And we wouldn't need to change the Vcs urls ;)

  That could be scripted. Actually, a script that automatically adds the
VCS lines to SVN-maintained packages should be trivial to write (and
I'll do that this afternoon). This way, hardly no pain ;-)...

  Cheers,

	Vincent

-- 
Vincent Fourmond, Debian Developer
http://vince-debian.blogspot.com/
-- pretty boring signature, isn't it ?