Things we ought to do to improve our packaging (Debian/Ubuntu specifics subthread)

[Max Bowsher]

On 09/08/13 08:03, Javi Merino wrote:
> Ok, I'm the one to blame for the Debian lag.  You're not the first
> upstream complaining about this and I can certainly understand why.  I
> think the best solution is to end up with something like what the
> mozilla guys did: an unofficial (according to Debian) repository[0]
> that has the latest and greatest versions of mozilla packages.  That
> way people that want the latest versions as soon as possible can add
> that repository.  The rest of the Debian users will get them from the
> official Debian repositories with its usual lag but being (in theory)
> more stable.
> 
> [0] http://mozilla.debian.net/
> 
> I'll upload mercurial 2.7 to Debian sid next week, I'll try to come up
> with a script that does the basic packaging so that you can autobuild
> Debian packages and provide them via mercurial.selenic.com.  Once
> that's working, we can talk about making a proper repository that can
> be added to apt and autobuilding Ubuntu packages.  Thoughts?

For me doing the Ubuntu packages, the biggest obstacle to full
automation is that every so often human attention is required to merge
the Debian patches with changes to the upstream tree.

I suspect increased automation may require eliminating at least some of
the patchset.

I have plenty of experience with various tools and/or ad-hoc scripts for
building apt repositories, so I suggest skipping an intermediate step of
providing manually downloadable .deb files entirely.

For Ubuntu autobuilding, I'm inclined to suggest sticking with
Launchpad, even if the end result gets synced to mercurial.selenic.com.

Max.