Hi, Steve Beattie: > Sorry, I've been swamped coping with Meltdown/Spectre. I took a brief > look at the topic git branches and it seems like a modest enough > organizational improvement to me[1].
OK. To me being able to use gbp-pq is a life-changer and I hope it'll be the same for you once you get used to it, but I agree that at the end of the day we're still tracking patches in Git, which has a number of drawbacks including the ones you've mentioned :) > What would need to happen on the Ubuntu side to go forward? Thanks for asking! 1. Start using the ubuntu/* namespace on the Git repo on salsa for the Ubuntu packaging. I've already imported your work up to 2.11.0-2ubuntu19 there. I did not import anything from your *-{security,updates} suites but DEP-14 should make it pretty easy to have dedicated branches for those. I'm happy to provide guidance if needed. 2. Merge the latest debian/2.12-* tag into ubuntu/master so you get 2.12 and the many packaging improvements you folks have reviewed and that are in Debian already (otherwise the delta will remain so big we can't proceed with the big next step easily). 3. Give me the go ahead and then I'll: - refresh the {debian,ubuntu}/gbp-pq branches - merge the {debian,ubuntu}/gbp-pq branches respectively into {debian,ubuntu}/master - push {debian,ubuntu}/master - release & upload to Debian sid - ask you to release & upload to Ubuntu It would be great if we could do that before 18.04 LTS is too deeply frozen so you can benefit, in the next 5 years, from all the goodness ubuntu/master..debian/master has accumulated since your last merge from Debian. If that timing is not an option, we could of course postpone this to post-18.04-release but then you'll have to deal with two vastly different debian/ directories between your LTS and ongoing development branches, which I expect might be quite painful and error-prone. And the following step of my secret evil plan is: 4. Check with Apertis what it would take to have them share our Git history (they're already using DEP-14 but with a different bzr→Git import that was done earlier) and possibly join the Salsa merge request fun so Debian and Ubuntu can benefit from the improvements Apertis made: a quick glance suggests that a few of their changes could be relevant for other distros :) Cheers, -- intrigeri