dpkg – Page 11

New source formats allowed in testing/unstable

November 2, 2009 by Raphaël Hertzog

The ftpmasters merged my dak branch last week during their meeting and have enabled the support of new source formats “3.0 (quilt)” and “3.0 (native)” in testing, unstable and testing-proposed-updates. I have uploaded 3 packages using the new formats already: logidee-tools using “3.0 (native)”, quilt and ftplib using “3.0 (quilt)”. The latter is arch any and has been successfully built on all architectures even those that still use an old version of sbuild (it looks like the fears that the old version would not cope with the new format were unfounded). For logidee-tools I built it with “-Zbzip2” in order to use bzip2 compression on the native tarball.

I have updated the wiki page and the release goal page with latest information. Feel free to convert some of your packages to give it a try. For ftplib, it led me to discover a Debian specific patch that I completely missed when I took the package over. This is precisely the kind of benefit that I expect from generalizing this format, it will encourage us to have separate documented patches instead of keeping everything hidden inside the usual .diff.gz. Combined with DEP-3 (patch tagging guidelines), we have a better infrastructure to share our patches with the rest of the free software community.

The next step is to fix all bugs listed here and make dpkg-source use the new source formats by default (#553928). Feel free to help by preparing patches (and offering NMUs), it’s a release goal to have all packages buildable with new source formats.

3-way merge of Debian changelog files

October 8, 2009 by Raphaël Hertzog

I’ve been considering for some time now to create a merge tool specifically suited for debian/changelog files. My goal was to let Git use it automatically thanks to gitattributes.

I’ve just gone ahead, so let me introduce you git-merge-dch. Grab it with git clone git://git.debian.org/~hertzog/git-merge-dch.git, you can build a package if you wish. Beware, you need to have a dpkg-dev 1.15.5 that is not yet published (so you need to build dpkg from its git repository, git clone git://git.debian.org/dpkg/dpkg.git) as I rely on features that I introduced recently… you will also need the libalgorithm-merge-perl package.

Using it in a git repository requires two changes:

defining a new merge driver somewhere in the git configuration (in .git/config or ~/.gitconfig for example):

[merge "git-merge-dch"]
        name = debian/changelog merge driver
        driver = git-merge-dch -m %O %A %B %A

defining the merge attribute for debian/changelog files either in .gitattributes in the repository itself or in .git/info/attributes:
```
debian/changelog merge=git-merge-dch
```

Now you can safely maintain two branches of a package with changelog files evolving separately and merge one into the other without creating undue conflicts. Suppose you created an experimental branch for version 2.28 (you use a version 2.28-1~exp1) when 2.26.2 was current stable in the master branch. In the mean time, 2.26.3 got out and was packaged in master. Next time you merge stable into experimental, the changelog entries for 2.28 and 2.26.3 won’t collide despite being at the same place in the changelog file compared to the common ancestor.

Let’s continue with this example, 2.28 is out. Instead of adding a new changelog entry with “New upstream release” without further changes, you keep the current changelog entry and simply change the version into 2.28-1. While preparing this you discover a branch with fixes that was based on 2.28-1~exp1, if you merge it it will reintroduce a 2.28-1~exp1 entry that you don’t want. Fortunately you can use the --merge-prereleases (-m) option of git-merge-dch so that it strip the prerelease part of the version string and considers 2.28-1~exp1 and 2.28-1 to be the same entry really.

The only limitation is that this merge tool will remove any lines which are not parsed by Dpkg::Changelog (and which in theory are not supposed to be there).

Feel free to test, share your comments, report bugs and send patches!

Update: the script has been merged in dpkg-dev (>= 1.15.7) under the name dpkg-mergechangelogs.

New source package formats: call for tests

March 16, 2008 by Raphaël Hertzog

During the last weeks I’ve been busy working on adding support of new source package formats to dpkg-source (the wig&pen format, a wig&pen variant based on quilt, Joey’s git based format integrated by djpig, …). I just reached the state where I believe the code is mostly ready to be merged in the master branch. Thus I would like some external testing and feedback.

Grab and install the package here and try building packages with dpkg-source "--format=3.0 (quilt)" -b mypackage (or any other new format). You can find more infos in the call for test on debian-dpkg (here and here). If you find regressions, please report them.

If you want to grab the latest sources, use git clone git://git.debian.org/git/dpkg/dpkg.git dpkg; cd dpkg; git checkout -b sourcev3 origin/sourcev3.

This time of the year again

March 3, 2008 by Raphaël Hertzog

Yes, it’s DPL election time again. On the good side, we’ll spend less time this year than we used to thanks the constitution change. On the bad side, it seems that almost nobody is interested to run for DPL (even HE is not sure yet!).

I’ve been relatively satisfied by the work done by sam (although one can always do better) and it looks like many share this feeling… and when this is the case, we just expect the DPL to run again. But sam clearly said that he won’t run again. What a pity.

I also don’t plan to run this year[1] but I’m always interested in leadership issues and I’d gladly be part of a DPL team. Hopefully someone will provide such an alternative on the ballot this year.

Right now, I’m more in the mood of implementing some real changes (like the symbol based dependencies that I added to dpkg-shlibdeps) instead of trying to convince others to do them. When you associate this to some support of the leadership in place, it can give very good results.

Now back to real work, I still have to test and polish the dpkg-source rewrite which adds support of several brand new source package formats. Feel free to check out our progress in the sourcev3 git branch.

[1] Feel free to convince me otherwise by adding some comments here.

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