Just a comment to your blog about VCS packaging in Fedora

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Toshio Kuratomi <a.badger at gmail.com> [2008.02.21.1749 +0100]:
> 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.

True, I remember that now. 

> * 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.

This is what I have been proposing to Debian for a while now:

http://madduck.net/blog/2005.08.11:rcs-uploads/

I never had the time to go through with this though. :((

> 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.

The same applies to Debian.

> 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.

My ideas go as far as creating a conceptual wrapper for the entire
process, which is VCS-agnostic. If we do this, we should also make
it distro-agnostic, and this is where Fedora and Debian ought to set
a precedent example of cross-distro collaboration.

Wrt patch dependencies, check out this (sub)thread on debian-devel
(Feb 2008):

  http://people.debian.org/~terpstra/message/20080216.232950.7001f17c.en.html

Also, a lot is being discussed on #debian-devel about the
combination of quilt and DVCS. I hope Manoj finds the time to post
a summary to this mailing list.

Thanks, Toshio, for your time and interest!

-- 
martin | http://madduck.net/ | http://two.sentenc.es/
 
"violence is the last refuge of the incompetent"
                                                       -- isaac asimov
 
spamtraps: madduck.bogus at madduck.net
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