[Mageia-dev] Distributed packaging for a community distro

[Colin Guthrie]

'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/]