git workflows for general Ubuntu development

[Sean Whitton]

Dear Robie,

Thank you for your detailed explanation of your project.  I'd like to
make just a few remarks in response to your criticisms of dgit.

Firstly, *everything* that you discuss under "Differences from Debian"
was in fact a target when dgit was designed.  I'm not going to respond
point-by-point, but in particular, dgit is designed to deal with the
fact that DDs make uploads not using dgit.  `dgit pull` handles this
very well.

On Tue, Nov 15, 2016 at 04:25:23PM +0000, Robie Basak wrote:
> 1. Removing .pc breaks quilt. Going with my incremental theme again, our
> import format does not break this; users do not have to learn any
> additional tools. dgit punts on this with "If you want to manipulate the
> patch stack you probably want to be looking at tools like git-dpm".

Secondly, with regard to the patches-unapplied/patches-applied debate, I
would encourage you to read dgit-maint-merge(7), a workflow tutorial
I wrote that is shipped with recent versions of dgit (or online[1]).
While this tutorial is targeted at Debian package maintainers, I think
that it could easily be adapted for use by a downstream distro.

What this tutorial encourages you to do is *stop* manipulating the patch
stack.  Users do not have to learn any additional tools basides git best
practices, which they should know anyway.  And new users do not have to
learn quilt.  IMO this is really important.

The most important part of the tutorial for realising this is putting
"single-debian-patch" and "auto-commit" in debian/source/options, but I
would also encourage you to read the section "Sample text for
README.source".

Like Ian, I beg you to reconsider this in the strongest possible terms!

[1]  http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ucgi/~ianmdlvl/git-manpage/dgit.git/dgit-maint-merge.7

-- 
Sean Whitton
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