ImprovingPackagingWorkflowWithBzr

Please check the status of this specification in Launchpad before editing it. If it is Approved, contact the Assignee or another knowledgeable person before making changes.

Summary

This should provide an overview of the issue/functionality/change proposed here. Focus here on what will actually be DONE, summarising that so that other people don't have to read the whole spec.

Release Note

This section should include a paragraph describing the end-user impact of this change. It is meant to be included in the release notes of the first release in which it is implemented. (Not all of these will actually be included in the release notes, at the release manager's discretion; but writing them is a useful exercise.)

It is mandatory.

Rationale

This should cover the _why_: why is this change being proposed, what justifies it, where we see this justified.

Use Cases

Assumptions

Design

You can have subsections that better describe specific parts of the issue.

Implementation

This section should describe a plan of action (the "how") to implement the changes discussed. Could include subsections like:

UI Changes

Should cover changes required to the UI, or specific UI that is required to implement this

Code Changes

Code changes should include an overview of what needs to change, and in some cases even the specific details.

Migration

Include:

  • data migration, if any
  • redirects from old URLs to new ones, if any
  • how users will be pointed to the new way of doing things, if necessary.

Test/Demo Plan

It's important that we are able to test new features, and demonstrate them to users. Use this section to describe a short plan that anybody can follow that demonstrates the feature is working. This can then be used during CD testing, and to show off after release.

This need not be added or completed until the specification is nearing beta.

Outstanding Issues

This should highlight any issues that should be addressed in further specifications, and not problems with the specification itself; since any specification with problems cannot be approved.

BoF agenda and discussion

Use this section to take notes during the BoF; if you keep it in the approved spec, use it for summarising what was discussed and note any options that were rejected.

Meeting Notes

Would like to have NoMoreSourcePackages, however Bazaar is too slow to have all packages including upstream in Bazaar. Bazaar is improving. Focus is currently on a new format which requires reading less data and doing less round trips, and speeding up the smart server.

There is no standard way to layout a branch. There are 3 ways

  • Version just debian/. further ways to do that.
    • - Have debian/ versioned. - Have contents in the root of the branch.
  • Import tarballs to get upstream.
  • Use a full upstream branch.
    • - Can be too large for some packages. - Allows patches to go upstream more easily if they use Bazaar.

Something like the loom plugin could be very useful as patch files in the source package have some benefits.

  • Robert may have some code in this area.
  • It is desirable, but a way off yet.
  • sometimes .orig.tar.gz files will have other tarballs within them
    • OpenOffice has some splitting this way

    • Other packages do this to work around build systems that don't fullly clean up (such as a package with a poorly written scons file)

When debian uses SVN bzr-svn can be useful to work with them.

Making apt-get source get a branch would be favourable as long as you already get a proper source packages as well. To make this work better having dput aware of this as well. If the uploader is required to commit ten mass transitions could become irritating. There could be a launchpad branch that merely reflects the current package in the archive that the maintainer can just pull from.

Making sure that XS-Vcs-Bzr is changed when Ubuntu makes changes is important.

(maybe metadata about how the branch is managed. OTOH, apt could just check the branch for its type)

Because samba uses git, there may be a bzr-git working properly soon.

Domain specific merge for debian/changelog should be possible.


CategorySpec

Spec/ImprovingPackagingWorkflowWithBzr (last edited 2008-08-06 16:34:02 by localhost)