Hi, Thought I might share insight as a relatively new contributor ;) [...]
> My experience since moving to bzr branches: > - Much, much faster updating of packages > - Branching packages is possible (e.g. working in a PPA) > - Patches are a little bit harder to do, as the branch doesn't contain > the files from the source tarball I guess I agree, you need to download the orig tarball at that point, but I feel using bzr bd-do to be quite helpful in dropping you straight to a clean unpacked tarball directory once that orig tarball is downloaded. However, I feel it fails when using branches in the normal mode precisely because of patches applied. I've had to unapply patches a few times before running merge-upstream, and it feels rather like a cumbersome and unnecessary step to me. I fear normal mode also leaves room for mistakes such as doing changes in-tree rather than using patches, even if this is probably an easy point of entry for new contributors (quickly getting patches done, to later step into packaging "proper") > - People are often ignoring the branches and uploading directly (or > forgetting do a bzr push) which means changes are sometimes dropped by > accident > - People often do merge requests to lp:ubuntu/package_name, even when > there is a packaging branch Agree. However, I've also run across two or three packages missing a Vcs-* field in debian/control. I believe this should help at least a little. [...] > Some issues that will remain: > - It is possible to screw up the branches so that bzr merge-package > throws a confusing error (I keep doing it). Perhaps we need some hooks > in bzr to stop this from occurring. If it can be broken, it will be > broken (repeatedly). bzr merge-package sounds like one place where using packaging branches in merge-mode would break too, no, seeing as the debian packages are in normal-mode branches? Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre <[email protected]> Freenode: cyphermox, Jabber: [email protected] 4096R/EE018C93 1967 8F7D 03A1 8F38 732E FF82 C126 33E1 EE01 8C93 -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
