Just a comment to your blog about VCS packaging in Fedora

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Matej Cepl wrote:
> Take a look at the bottom of
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/VersionControl/ArchitectureDraft -- it has been last updated on 2006-07-23. That's ancient history in the fast flowing Fedora world. In the last year or so I have never ever heard anybody mention other DVCS than git. Aside from bzr coming from THEM :-), there is such overwhelming majority of git users over anybody else, that nothing else than git is just not an option for distributed VCS.
> 
> There are periodically flamewars about switching our packaging to DVCS
> (hell, I would be glad if we use at least CVS correctly), but usually
> there are good reasons why it is rejected. See for example
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel/68551/ and
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel/56870/ or
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel/48106/ for
> examples of such flamewars. However, people are still working around
> this (and yes, I know personally about many many people inside of Red
> Hat who use git-cvsimport for their own packages) -- see
> http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.redhat.fedora.devel/71048
> 
Uhm.... Matej, please don't speak for the rest of us.  The main reason 
that we haven't switched to a DVCS is that none of the people who 
implements things for infrastructure wants to step on the toes of people 
  who believe that a different DVCS is the way to go.  git, hg, svn, and 
bzr were all proof-of-concepts but none of them were able to reach a 
critical mass of support vs hate.

However, madduck does have a few inaccuracies in his blog post[1]_.  In 
order of appearance rather than importance:
* The tarball is not downloaded from the source URL when building the 
SRPM.  We upload the tarballs to a lookaside cache before checking in a 
new version of the package.  That way we aren't at the mercy of upstream 
changing locations or disappearing entirely.
* The ArchitectureDraft proposal is one of many potential ways that were 
explored to do this.  So even though it's a writeup of bzr, the things 
that have been tried has spanned most of the current major vcs's (darcs 
being the one exception due to it's not meeting our requirements for 
keeping history intact.)
* My understanding is that Debian packages reach the repo by way of a 
trusted contributor building the package and uploading to the master 
server.  In Fedora all changes are checked into VCS and then the 
buildsystem pulls the files from there and builds the packages.  So the 
VCS usage in Fedora has a centralized hub in the form of the buildsystem.

I do think that madduck has nailed one of the problems with switching to 
a new version control system for Fedora although the knowledge doesn't 
mean as much to him as it does to us (because Debian's current VCS usage 
is much different than ours).  Contributors are never going to agree on 
one true VCS for our needs but we need to have a centralized repo for 
the buildsystem.  For us to get critical mass to migrate is near impossible.

P.S.: madduck, I like your categorization of changes although I think 
we'll have to make it feel less complicated for the end-user packager to 
  adopt.  Solving the patch dependencies is the truly hard part of that 
problem as everything I've looked at has either made constructing the 
dependencies or the application to the vanilla source hard.

.. _[1]: 
http://madduck.net/blog/2008.01.29:consolidating-packaging-workflows-across-distros/

-Toshio

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