[DRE-maint] getting rid of packages-wip/ in our SVN repository

[Gunnar Wolf]

[ I am adding a Cc: to the debian-perl list, as the PET wizards live
  there and might have a say on this. Also, because the pkg-perl group
  has some packages which could be moved into a packages-wip
  directory, cleaning up our main stats? ]

This thread starts at [1].

Antonio Terceiro dijo [Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 01:15:50PM -0300]:
> Hi all,
> 
> I was just wondering: since our QA report tool [1] supports listing
> packages not in the repository yet as "work in progress" [2], why don't we
> remove the packages-wip/ directory from our repository?
> 
> This would have IMO the following advantages:
> 
>   * the WIP packages would appear in the QA report and we would be
>     more aware of their status
>   * less clutter in our repository

I agree with your motivation, it's good for them to be more
visible. However, PET's logic is a bit different - And I think we
could import some changes in our logic from the pkg-perl group :)

pkg-ruby extras uses packages-wip for things that have started moving,
but are still not good enough for upload. Those are... well, somehow
out of PET's scope, IMHO (although telling us about new versions could
be good). 

What pkg-ruby-extras regards as 'work in progress' is packages that,
in their version in SVN, have an UNRELEASED distribution. It is
customary in the pkg-perl group to always tag with "svn-buildpackage
--svn-only-tag --svn-noautodch". This means, we never have changelog
entries such as (taken randomly):

    liblog4r-ruby (1.0.5-8) UNRELEASED; urgency=low

      * NOT RELEASED YET

IMHO, this entry says nothing, and probably will only be bothering us
later. If the next action we take on liblog4r-ruby is to import a new
upstream version, we will have to manually remove the entry for
1.0.5-8 (which will never exist). What is done in pkg-perl is to
reserve the UNRELEASED tag for changes made in the package which are
not ready to be uploaded - Please refer to the changelogs in the
repository (the smaller number in parenthesis) at the "Work in
progress" section of the pkg-perl page [2].

We almost always have there an invalid changelog entry, starting with
a TODO: detailing what is missing in that package.

> I am willing to organize that, what do you think?

I do think packages-wip is a good thing to have. Maybe it would be
better to "export" the idea to other groups, and add support for it in
PET, just as an extra section?

[1] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-ruby-extras-maintainers/2008-September/003131.html

[2] http://pkg-perl.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/qareport.cgi

-- 
Gunnar Wolf - gwolf at gwolf.org - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244
PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23
Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973  F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF