Intent to commit craziness - source package unpacking

[Ian Jackson]

Ian Jackson writes ("Re: Intent to commit craziness - source package unpacking"):
> Thanks for your comments.  I feel unblocked :-).

So, I now intend to go and implement my plan.

There will be a little while (perhaps a few weeks) before I am in a
postion to release this in dgit 2.0.  But after I do that, I will not
want to change the import algorithm again: it is important that the
imports be as stable as possible.

So now would be a good time for maintainers of git packaging tools (eg
git-dpm and gpb) to have an opinion about the detail of the generated
pseudohistory - in particular, the detail of the commits generated
from the `3.0 (quilt)' dpkg-source patches.

Also, I would welcome suggestions for what kind of compatibility test
I could perform on such a series of commits.  dgit has an extensive
test suite (advertised via autopkgtest) which would be well-suited to
such a compatibility test.

An example of such a tree might be, "split out the patch queue part of
the git pseudohistory and feed it to gbp-pq, asking gbp-pq to
regenerate the source package, and expect the output to be identical
to the original input source package".  Guido, if I get the
preconditions right, should I expect such a test to pass ?  Is there a
risk it would break in the future due to changes in gbp-pq's
conversion algorithm ?

I confess that I am less familiar with git-dpm.  I don't know what I
should be thinking about to try to make the output most useful to
git-dpm users.

(I also don't know whether the goals of helping git-dpm users and
gbp-pq users, and potentially users of any other tools, are in
conflict.

It would be annoying if these tools would disagree about the best form
of import of a particular patch queue: the import algorithm should be
the same for different dgit users, so I wouldn't be able to make this
a per-user configuration option and would have to choose..)

Thanks,
Ian.

-- 
Ian Jackson <ijackson at chiark.greenend.org.uk>   These opinions are my own.

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