Inside-out packaging

[Sam Vilain]

martin f krafft wrote:
>>    debian/ upstream/
>> Where upstream is a submodule that points to an upstream repo.
>> This also keeps the debian changelog nicely away from the upstream
>> one.
>> Anyone experimented with this?
> I've experimented with this a tiny bit, yes. In your model, how do
> you deal with Debian-specific changes to the upstream source, e.g.
> to make it FHS-compliant?

Well, you can still apply patches directly in the submodule, you just
need to make sure that the URL listed in the ".gitmodules" in the
supermodule points to a repository that has the new commits that you
madse.  The history in the supermodule then just becomes "added these
patches: xxx" with the change being the submodule commit ID changed.

> Also, the Debian changelog is already nicely away from the upstream
> one, isn't it? That said, I still believe we need to get rid of
> having the Debian changelog stored as a file in VCS...

The principle advantage of this approach is that the debian changelog
could then be safely gathered from the supermodule commit log, which
should be purely packaging changes and no application changes.  So the
debian/changelog can then be safely generated from `git-log' et al.

Sam.