[Mageia-dev] Distributed packaging for a community distro

Sun Sep 19 13:10:57 CEST 2010

On Sunday 19 September 2010, Colin Guthrie wrote:
+ > 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.
+The idea is that we don't submit the source tar inside our own "packaging" 
+repo, but the opposite: that we submit our "mageia.spec" file into the upstream 
+project's git repo. So, no binary churns. The same way as some projects 
+already have a "debian/" folder or sample RedHat .specs .
+If we need to patch the upstream (or the upstream is not interested to include 
+our spec), we will just keep a git branch of our "flavour", which follows 
+upstream.
+
+> 
+>  * 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.
+
+That's where we use the master repo with submodules . The master will do the 
+tag-keeping.
+
+> (I do hope these are mentioned in the above links)
+> 
+> Anyway, as a general rule, I'm very much behind using git for packages :)
+> 
+
+Another issue, already thought of is what if upstream doesn't use git: there 
+are many usable converters, now, from SVN, CVS, Bzr[1], Hg etc. So, we can 
+incrementaly import those projects.
+
+
+[1] already patched the bzr-fastexport 's bugs.
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+