[cl-debian] Moving to darcs.debian.org, co-maintenance and other bits

[Luca Capello]

Hi all,

I directly mailed all the people that I'm aware are involved in Common
Lisp packaging for Debian to be sure they read this mail (which is
quite long).

Don't take this mail as personal: this is just an attempt to improve
the current CL-Debian project.

1) Since Oct 4th, Alioth supports also darcs as VCS [1].  This means
   that we can move all the darcs maintained packages [2] to the
   commond darcs infrastructure, which is managed as explained at [3]:

     http://darcs.debian.org/$GROUP/$PACKAGE

   I'll start to move my packages as soon as the others keypoint
   expressed below are cleared.

2) AFAIK, at least three different VCSs are used for CL-Debian stuffs:
   bzr, darcs and git (this one especially by Kevin).  Moreover,
   Pierre has prepared his packages using mercurial [4].  For this
   reason, I think that we should ask for a $GROUP folder in all of
   the VCSs we use, similar to the collab-maint project [5].

   In this regard, I don't think we should restrict the number of VCSs
   we use: obviously, having only one VCS would be easier to learn and
   maintain, but whenever it's possible I prefer to follow upstream,
   providing that they use a distributed VCS.

   For example, all of my packages are in darcs: the upstream BESE
   ones [6] are in darcs, too, while the others upstream are in CVS.
   However, since StumpWM recently moved to git [7], I'm planning to
   follow that move for the Debian package as well, leaving darcs in
   favor of git.

3) During a private discussion between Peter and me, one idea that
   came out was to go for co-maintenance of the CL-Debian packages.
   Thus, all the people involved in the project (and registered in the
   Alioth group) would have write permission to all repositories
   within the group.

   This doesn't mean that the packages will be automagically and
   suddenly co-maintained by all of us, but that there's still a
   principal maintainer, while the others can sparely act on the
   package in case of urgency or small fixes.

   To achieve this goal, the Maintainer: field in debian/control will
   contain the mailing list address (see point 5 below), while the
   principal maintainer (with all the others involved) will end up in
   the Uploaders: field.

   In case someone would argue against this action and would preserve
   full control over his packages, I think that implementing a partial
   co-maintenance will be anyway worth it, so point 5 below stands in
   any case.

4) A further step in co-maintenance would be to allow write permission
   to DDs outside the CL-Debian project, in a way similar to the
   collab-maint one, as Stefano explained at [8].  This could be
   really useful for translators, for example.

5) Whatever we decide about a full or partial co-maintenance and since
   we're moving to 100% Alioth, we should move the mailing list as
   well.  Doing so, we should decide if we want to keep the current
   project name or change it to something similar to other packaging
   groups.  The latter includes pkg-commonlisp (or pkg-cl or what
   else) or simply Common Lisp team (thus common-lisp as the project
   name).

   Always WRT the mailing list, we can also ask for a commit mailing
   list, where all the commit to the different package archives will
   be automatically posted.  Would it be useful?

6) While searching for all the people/groups involved in Common Lisp
   and Debian, I found that clc (the Common Lisp Controller) has its
   own Alioth project [9].  Should it be incorporated into the
   CL-Debian group instead?

I hope to have missed nothing and I'm waiting for comments and
suggestions.

Thx, bye,
Gismo / Luca 

Footnotes: 
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2007/10/msg00002.html
[2] http://cl-debian.alioth.debian.org/repositories/
[3] http://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/darcs
[4] http://common-lisp.net/pipermail/cl-debian/2007-September/002836.html
[5] http://alioth.debian.org/projects/collab-maint/
[6] http://common-lisp.net/project/bese/
[7] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/stumpwm-devel/2007-09/msg00003.html
[8] http://www.bononia.it/~zack/blog//posts/2007/08/DD_wide_commit_on_alioth.html
[9] http://alioth.debian.org/projects/clc/
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