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

[Luca Capello]

Hi Pierre!

On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 00:19:55 +0200, Pierre THIERRY wrote:
> Scribit Luca Capello dies 09/10/2007 hora 21:58:
>> This is another point: we should distinguish between DDs involved
>> in the CL-Debian project and any DDs outside it.
>
> I would suggest the following repos, by default, for each package.
> Note that anything but the main repo is optional, and could be
> created on demand.

Fully agree, assuming that "main" means "the one from where the Debian
package is built (and uploaded).  However...

> - upstream		upstream code

This is needed for example if you work with darcs-buildpackage (and
it's called package.upstream).  I don't know anything about the others
$VCS-buildpackage tools and if anyone uses them.

> - nmu			code uploaded by non-maintainers

I'd say that NMUs patches can be directly applied to the Debian repo,
at least I won't consider them a problem at all.  This because as soon
as a package is NMUed, then Debian contains anyway the NMU patch.  So,
if the official maintainer doesn't like the patch it can revert it.
This avoids code/repo duplication, too.

> - proposed		code not uplaoded, for review

I'd prefer the patch posted to the mailing list, but this is personal.

> At least git and hg have the ability to hardlink repository data. A
> Mercurial repo can also be updated to its null revision so as not to
> have a working copy (or, actaully, an empty one). So we could create
> automatically a dozen of repos for each package basically at no cost
> (things like nmu-l10n).

Especially for l10n, if we coordinate the work with the l10n team I
see no hurt in giving them write permissions to the Debian repo
(similarly to the NMU situation I explained above).

Since we use DVCSs, people can have their personal repositories on
Alioth as public_VCS, which can be easily downloaded.  Yes, I'd prefer
less repos in the group and, if needed, more personal repos.

> We may also have repos or tags to make it easy to track Debian
> releases.

Mmm, can you elaborate on this?  I see the need for a Debian release
specific repo only in case of backports (because usually you need to
change the dependencies and maybe patch upstream).

> An upstream repo would only be needed if we don't use upstream's
> DVCS, actually.

As I already explained for darcs, the upstream repo is necessary to
use darcs-buildpackage (which is optional, but helps).

>> If we include clc in the CL-Debian project, we not only maintain
>> Debian packages, but we develop software, too.  Thus, I'd say the
>> best name would be
>> 
>>     Debian Common Lisp Team <pkg-cl-devel at ...>
>
> +1

Any other opionion except Pierre and me?

Thx, bye,
Gismo / Luca