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

[Bernd Zeimetz]

Hi,

> 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.

As we don't import upstream tarballs I can't see the problem here. Imho
svn is more easy to handle for a lot of people and it makes it much more
easy to keep a complete checkout of all packages available.


> 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.

If we move to a DRCS, I'd suggest git, too - hg is (imho) ugly, and git
works very well.

> 
> 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.

What about using git-svn? Moving to git completely would be a *lot* of
work and I can't see enough advantages to do it. A lot of people handle
git in different ways, and if I look at the discussions in other groups
(for example dpkg...) I think that's a good reason not to use it.
Working with git-svn on top of svn is easy to do, gives you all
advantages of git and keeps the original repository useable for all people.

To sum it up: I would prefer to stay with svn, and those who don't like
svn just use git-svn or whatever-svn.


Best regards,

Bernd
-- 
 Bernd Zeimetz                           Debian GNU/Linux Developer
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