Wolodja Wentland <babi...@gmail.com> writes: > I've recently started to work on some packages and am not sure if I > follow best practices when packaging software from git repositories with > git-buildpackage.
[...] I do the following for OpenAFS (see the supporting scripts in the openafs source package) based on work done by Sam Hartman for krb5, and I'm very happy with it. I'm probably going to eventually adopt the same approach for all other software with a Git upstream. The key feature is that the import-upstream script imports the tarball contents but commits it as a merge between the upstream tag and the local upstream branch, which preserves all of upstream's commit history while simultaneously including in the upstream branch any tarball-generated files that aren't in Git. This isn't required for OpenAFS, but for some other packages I want to use some of the files that are generated as part of the upstream tarball release but aren't checked in. (This is part of debian/README.source for the openafs package.) Importing a New Upstream Release We want to be able to use Git to cherry-pick fixes from upstream, but we want to base the Debian packages on the upstream tarball releases. We also need to strip some non-DFSG files from the upstream tarball releases and imported code, and want to drop the WINNT directory to save some space. This means we follow a slightly complicated method for importing a new upstream release. Follow the following procedure to import a new upstream release: 1. Update the package version in debian/changelog to match the new upstream version. If the new upstream version is a release candidate, don't forget to add "~" before "rc" so that the versions will sort property. 2. Double-check the TAG setting in debian/rules to be sure it's going to retrieve the correct Git tag. 3. Run debian/rules get-orig-source. This will generate a tarball from the upstream Git tag using git archive, remove the WINNT directory, and create a file named openafs_<version>.orig.tar.gz in the current directory. 4. Ensure that you have the OpenAFS upstream Git repository available as a remote in the Git repository where you're doing the packaging work and it's up to date: git remote add openafs git://git.openafs.org/openafs.git git fetch openafs This will be required to locate the tag for the new upstream release. 5. Determine the release tag corresponding to this tarball. At the time of this writing, upstream uses tags in the form: openafs-stable-<version> openafs-devel-<version> for stable and development releases respectively. <version> is the version number with periods replaced by underscores. This convention may change, so double-check with git tag. 6. Import the upstream source from the tarball with: debian/import-upstream <tarball> <upstream-tag> <local-tag> where <tarball> is the tarball created by get-orig-source above, <upstream-tag> is the corresponding tag from the upstream Git repository, and <local-tag> is of the form upstream/<version> where <version> is the non-Debian portion of the package version number. (In other words, including any tildes, but not the dash and the Debian revision.) 7. Commit the tarball to the repository with pristine-tar, using the new local tag as the reference: pristine-tar commit <tarball> <local-tag> 8. Merge the new upstream source into the master branch: git checkout master git merge <local-tag> where <local-tag> is the tag you used above. You can also just merge with the upstream branch; either is equivalent. 9. Flesh out the changelog entry for the new version with a summary of what changed in that release, and continue as normal with Debian packaging. Pulling Upstream Changes Upstream releases, particularly stable releases, are relatively infrequent, so it's often desirable to pull upstream changes from the stable branch into the Debian package. This should always be done using git cherry-pick -x so that we can use git cherry to see which changes on the stable branch have not been picked up. The procedure is therefore: 1. Identify the hash of the commit that you want to pull up using git log or other information. 2. git cherry-pick -x <hash>. If the cherry-pick fails and you have to manually do a merge, follow the instructions to use -c to keep the original commit message as a starting point, but *also* manually add a line like: (cherry picked from commit <hash>) to the changelog entry where <hash> is the full hash of the upstream commit. Note that the upstream commits on the stable branch will generally already have a line like this from upstream's cherry-pick. This will be a second line. 3. Add a changelog entry and commit it separately. Use the following convention for changelog entries for cherry-picks: * Apply upstream deltas: - [<hash>] <title> - ... where <hash> is the first eight characters of the upstream commit hash and <title> is the first line of the upstream commit message, edited as necessary to keep the length of the changelog lines down. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-mentors-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87ei23chk2....@windlord.stanford.edu