[Mageia-dev] Distributed packaging for a community distro

P. Christeas p_christ at hol.gr
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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