bzr and Ubuntu: what it means for vcs-pkg (was: Re: Bazaar branches for all Ubuntu source packages available)

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 09:06:05PM +0000, James Westby wrote:
> > In particular, logs are important, for example I'd be curious to know
> > how much the typical access path to your sources (presumably "apt-get
> > source", but maybe even the website, or whatever else) will change
> > with this.
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean here, could you clarify?

Sorry, I wasn't clear.

I meant to ask whether you plan to look at bzr access logs and compare
them with HTTP access logs to source packages from the archive. The
goal of that would be to evaluate how many "users" shift to bzr for
retrieving Ubuntu source package.

>   http://code.launchpad.net/bzr-builddeb

Thanks for the pointer.

> You could implement different back-ends, but I don't have a desire
> to, and I'm not sure it would be a good idea.

Can you elaborate on that?
Why you don't think it would be a good idea?

> There are some difficulties though. For instance we want full source
> branches, and a lot of SVN packaging is mergeWithUpstream style, so
> we will have to put it back together again while still making it
> useful for collaboration. We also need to handle the probably
> hundreds of tagging schemes out there to be able to tag the historic
> releases appropriately.

Yes, I know, been there for svn -> git migration, it is rather painful
indeed.

> The UDS session I linked to is about this. This cycle I am going to
> be working on bringing up an import of Debian to bzr with shared
> revision history and all the merges represented as multi-parent
> commits.

Just to be sure, you mean the whole Debian archive, or only the slice
corresponding to Ubuntu main (not sure about the name, but I mean
everything which is not universe).

> These branches will be hosted on launchpad as well, under the
> "/debian/" namespace.

Cool!

> One thing that is going to hamper us is that we don't have historic
> packages for Debian. I'm interested to know if the official version
> of "snapshot.debian.net" will have all the old packages, which would
> be a massive help for us. If not then we may end up with the bzr
> branches suggesting that Debian was branched off Ubuntu :-)

Unfortunately no, snapshot.d.n can be missing stuff. Not only it
suffered from downtimes which I don't believe has been a posteriori
filled back in, but it is also not really well synchronized with dak
(the archive maintenance tool) runs in Debian. For example, while dak
runs twice a day to change the archive, snapshot.d.n is updated only
once, so it is theoretically possible that a package updated twice in
a day figures only once on snapshot.d.n.

The forthcoming snapshot.debian.*org* will solve this and similar
problems as it will be more tightly coupled with dak, but we don't
have it yet. Even when we will, it wouldn't solve the problem for past
versions.

> If any interested Debian people can make it to UDS in SF next week
> then your input in to the above discussion would be appreciated. We
> have a few DDs invited, and plenty of DDs within Ubuntu anyway, so
> that perspective will be represented, but having any specifically
> interested in this topic would be great.

Well, too bad, I would've loved to attend to discuss this kind of
stuff, but it is definitely impossible to do that now, with such a
short notice.

Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..|  .  |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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