DVCS packaging for Mer

[David Greaves]

Hi

A little background: I am working on a small distro called Mer [1] which is a
community distro version of Nokia's Maemo platform for their mobile internet
devices. For arm support reasons we are based over both Ubuntu and Debian using
OBS; we support a variety of touch devices including N8x0, Freerunner, SmartQ5/7
and Beagleboards.

We need to package and manage a couple of hundred modified packages.

I've looked at the processes that have been put up and wanted to keep the number
of ancilliary applications to a minimum.

Requirements:
* Allow functional separation of patches to allow easier future integration
* Support our role as a distro
  Provide packages
  Support maintenance releases
* Support our role as an upstream (just UbuntuMID ... for now)
  Handle a variety of feature/fix patches
  Isolate code from packaging
* Open to community involvement
* Secure(able) process with minimal write access to master source

I thought you may be interested in the process and description we're now
starting to use:

  http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer/Build/UsingGitorious

This is totally new ground to me; I'm not a packager and although I worked
around git in the early days I'm not experienced in using it in complex team
situations so I would welcome comments and discussion; we're active in #mer on
freenode and I'm usually in #vcs-pkg on debian-irc too.

David

[1] http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer

-- 
"Don't worry, you'll be fine; I saw it work in a cartoon once..."