[Mageia-dev] Distributed packaging for a community distro

Sun Sep 19 12:30:48 CEST 2010

'Twas brillig, and P. Christeas at 19/09/10 11:07 did gyre and gimble:
+> On Sunday 19 September 2010, Aurelien Bompard wrote:
+>> Hey,
+>>
+>> I'm a Fedora packager, and we recently switched to Git as a SCM. It's
+>> working fine for us, maybe these pages can be of inspiration :
+>>
+>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Dist_Git_Proposal
+>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Using_Fedora_GIT
+>>
+>> We're also using a small command-line wrapper called fedpkg to interact
+>> with the build system and to make it easier for non-git users to grasp the
+>> packaging workflow.
+>>
+>> I don't know what you already have setup, so this may be irrelevant... ;-)
+>>
+> 
+> *Definitely* like the idea of cooperating with other distros. Let's end up with 
+> something everybody will benefit from.
+
+I think for simplisity in the initial stages, we'll likely be sticking
+with SVN considering there is a *lot* of infrastructural things to get
+in place.
+
+But overall, I'd *very* much like to entertain a svn->git switch. Using
+the experiences of the fedora packages here would make a *lot* of sense
+from a general sharing perspective.
+
+Plus with the amount of upstream projects using git this has a lot of
+advantages.
+
+I've not read the above fedora links yet (I definitely will), but the
+two immediate problems I have are:
+
+ * Binary churn: If we add the tarballs, there can be a lot of binary
+churn. Cloning a git repo means we get the full history locally which
+means all copies of the tarball over the x years period. SVN is better
+suited to binary churn, only keeping the most recent version in your
+checkout. This is likely discussed above.
+
+ * Tagging: When a release is done, the packages need to be tagged. This
+is more awkward with individual repos rather than one central one, but I
+suspect it's a relatively easy process to script.
+
+(I do hope these are mentioned in the above links)
+
+Anyway, as a general rule, I'm very much behind using git for packages :)
+
+
+Col
+-- 
+
+Colin Guthrie
+mageia(at)colin.guthr.ie
+http://colin.guthr.ie/
+
+Day Job:
+  Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/]
+Open Source:
+  Mageia Contributor [http://www.mageia.org/]
+  PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/]
+  Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]
+