[Python-modules-team] Can we get rid of svn-buildpackage?

[Christoph Haas]

Fellow pythoneers...

We talked it over on #debian-python recently and I'd like to ask about it 
to our mailing list now. Honestly I'm pretty unhappy with maintaining 
packages with svn-buildpackage. I have previously co-maintained Debian 
packages with svn-buildpackage and it was too easy for us to screw up 
things. And importing new upstream releases was always an adventure (I 
even backed up the server repository before upgrading because we managed 
to break it on more than one occasion on a complex package). During the 
last months I have hardly done any DPMT-related work mainly because I just 
don't like the repository.

So I would like to propose that we switch to another RCS. Two possible 
alternatives I could think of are Mercurial (hg-buildpackage) and Git 
(git-buildpackage). Unfortunately hg-buildpackage is not written in Python 
but in Haskell (=less known probably). And John Goerzen abandoned the 
software because he moved to Git. So hg-buildpackage basically works - 
modulo some minor quirks - but is unmaintained. I recently moved my 
packages to git-buildpackage, too (http://git.workaround.org). And while 
I'm no Git guru at all I think I can get used to it. At least 
git-buildpackage seems to work reliably.

So what do you think? I could imagine that we request a "dpmt" 
or "pkg-python-modules" repository on git.debian.org and start moving 
packages there. After the root directory has been created we can create 
subdirectories for all the packages we maintain in the team.

So a possible course of action could be:
(1) See if you are interested :)
(2) Request a git directory
(3) Find a way to migrate to git (minimum: git-import-dsc on the latest
    package)
(4) Rewrite wiki documentation on how to work with git-buildpackage
    instead of hg-buildpackage

Pros of switching to git-buildpackage:
- actively maintained apparently
- git-import-dsc and git-buildpackage work reliable here
  (even with pbuilder)
- the basic commands of Git are similar to SVN
  (the more complicated commands look way more satanic)
- you can go back in time to any revision and build that
  (nice for security patching stable releases)
- upstream tarball gets imported as a Git branch so you don't
  need an extra "tarballs" directory to build a package
  (yes, this wastes a little more space but is pretty convenient)

Cons of switching to git-buildpackage:
- maintainers not familiar with Git will have to learn a little
- existing repository will have to be migrated

If I fail to raise enough interest I'll probably start to maintain DPMT 
packages with git-svn at least to ease the pain.

Let me know what you think.

Cheers
 Christoph
-- 
When you do things right people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
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