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

[James Westby]

On Mon, 2008-12-01 at 09:15 +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> 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.

Well, it's http access logs as well, but that would be an interesting
thing to do.

> > 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?

I'm not sure whether providing branches for each VCS is a good idea,
as I'm not sure it would help collaboration that much. If I grab a bzr
branch to work on a feature, and you want to use git to work on that
feature too then we have to provide a service to synchronise branches 
for you, and you would have to wait while my branch was imported to
git before you could start work.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't be allowed to work in your preferred
VCS, just that trying to provide branches of everything in every VCS
isn't going to be a workable solution in my opinion. I think investing
time in things like git-bzr and allowing you to get git branches of
the things you are interested in would be a better way to go.

> > 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).

The whole Debian archive. The branches we have are not just for main 
they are all ~15000 source packages.

> > 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.

Thanks for the information, it sounds like we might be a bit stuck 
there.

> > 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.

Sorry about that, I didn't think to bring it up before.

Thanks,

James