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zack's vcs related blog posts debcheckout hacking

New features for debcheckout, … now with TopGit support!

Today I’ve spent some time hacking on debcheckout, which for weird reasons happens to be at the bottom of a stack of chained things that I need to do in the forthcoming days. Also, I had neglected debcheckout for a while, and the other devscripts folks where ready to shout at me because of that :-) .

Well, it has been fun, and beside having fixed all the outstanding bugs, debcheckout has grown some cute new features:

Enjoy!

(ah, of course all this is not uploaded yet, but you can grab a preview from devscripts’ VCS or, better, doing debcheckout devscripts which is soooo bootstrapy. SCNR.)

Posted Fri 31 Oct 2008 00:31:47 UTC Tags: ?zack
madduck's vcs-pkg-related blog posts RRR Interview on Debian and cross-distro collaboration

During LCA2008, Ed Borland of Melbourne-based Triple R FM Byte Into It show took me aside for an interview and asked some good questions about Debian and my work on cross-distro collaboration. The interview was recorded and is now available as Ogg Vorbis file from the 14 May 2008 issue of Byte Into It.

I am looking forward to any feedback.

Thanks to Ed and Phil Wales for their time and help.

NP: Mono: You Are There

Posted Tue 20 May 2008 16:31:28 UTC Tags: ?madduck
madduck's vcs-pkg-related blog posts vcs-pkg work session in Extremadura, 2nd try

We were given another chance to meet in Extremadura to discuss vcs-pkg issues, after the first opportunity was too short notice.

Currently, the tentatively scheduled dates are 2-7 September 2008. You can get the details from the wiki page. If you’re interested, please reserve those dates and add yourself to the list of participants.

NP: Hooverphonic: The Magnificent Tree

Posted Sun 18 May 2008 13:16:57 UTC Tags: ?madduck
Manoj Srivastava's SCM and packaging related blog posts Manoj: Schemes for packaging using Git: An analysis

“Are you rebasing or merging?” seems to be the 64 thousand dollar question over in vcs-pkg discussions. Various people have offered their preferences, and indeed, several case studies of work flows have been presented, what is lacking is an analysis of the work-flow; an exploration of which methodology has advantages, and whether there are scenarios in which the other work flow would have been better.

Oh, what are all these work flows about, you ask? Most of the issues with packaging software for distributions have a few things in common: there is a mainline or upstream source of development. There are zero or more independent lines of development or ongoing bug fixes that are to be managed. And then there is the tree from which the distribution package is to be built. All this talk about packaging software work flows is how to best manage asynchronous development upstream and in the independent lines of development, and how to create a coherent, debuggable, integrated tree from which to build the distributions package.

The rebasing question goes to the heart of how to handle the independent lines of development using git; since these lines of development are based off the main line of development, and must be periodically synchronized. Here is a first look at a couple of important factors that will have bearing on that question, and packaging software for a distribution using Git in general. This is heavily geared towards git (nothing else does rebases so easily, I think), but some of the concepts should be generic. I am not considering the stacked set of quilt patches source controlled with Git in this article (I don’t understand that model well enough to do an analysis)

As a teaser, there is a third answer: neither. You can just add an independent line of development, and just let it sit: don’t rebase, and don’t merge; and in some circumstances that is a winning strategy.

Posted Fri 04 Apr 2008 19:48:10 UTC Tags: ?manoj
Manoj Srivastava's SCM and packaging related blog posts Manoj: Migrating to Git

I have been using Arch to package my Debian packages since 2003; which means that Arch has had a good long run as my SCM of choice. I have been using CVS for a few years before I moved to arch, and the migration took me about six months, since it involved a while new philosophy of packaging; I am hoping that migrating to git would not involve such a major paradigm shift, and thus be less disruptive and time consuming. What follows is a narrative of my efforts to get educated about Git.

This article is meant to be an annotated, selective, organized set of links to information about Git. How does it differ from the myriad of other link collections about Git proliferating on the web? Well, the value add is in the annotations and the organization: while not quite a narrative of my exploration, this is an idealized version of what I think my discovery process should have been, to be most effective. Staging the information is important; google finds one lots of information that is incomprehensible to someone just coming to Git. This selection of links is actually selective; I have included only pointers to resources that fed me information at the level that I could handle at that stage, and I have eliminated links to information that was not new at that point. I have tried to select the best (in terms of information and clarity) of breed for each kind of information source I have come across so far.

There is a caveat: while still a beginner, though I am able to better judge now what is confusing to a beginner than I shall be when I have become more familiar with the system, I am still enough of a novice not to trust my judgement on what really is best practice. I can fix the latter as I gain experience, but then I’ll need to be careful not to overload on complexity too early in the learning curve.

On the down side, this selection is subjective, and probably shall be even in the long term: I include what appealed to me, and will probably miss loads of pointers to information that I have not yet come across. However, I hope this will make it easier for other people to reach the same goal: use git for their version control needs.

Have fun.

Posted Wed 02 Apr 2008 04:17:27 UTC Tags: ?manoj
jelmer's vcs-pkg related blog posts Using bzr-builddeb as a svn-buildpackage replacement

This slightly evil hack to bzr-svn allows using bzr-builddeb as a drop-in replacement for svn-buildpackage, making it recognize the “mergeWithUpstream” property svn-buildpackage uses.

cp: Jeff Healey - Mess O’ Blues

Posted Wed 26 Mar 2008 15:21:20 UTC Tags: ?jelmer
zack's vcs related blog posts git-buildpackage from debian-only to debian+upstream

Moving a git layout from debian-only to debian+upstream

… and live happily with git-buildpackage

Let’s say you have a git repository you have used thus far to maintain only the Debian part of some package (i.e. no upstream sources on sight).

OK, you’re right, that would be quite an uncommon scenario for a git repository. In fact the truth is that you are in such a situation because the git repo was obtained converting from a subversion repo which was using the mergeWithUpstream stuff of svn-buildpackage.

Now that you have git’s space efficiency you want to change this, import upstream sources, and possibly adhere to a branch layout which is compatible with git-buildpackage (which is very simple in its minimal requirements: an upstream branch containing just upstream sources and a master branch containing a debianized source tree).

Out of the box git-import-orig won’t work since don’t have the upstream branch. Creating it branching from master (or somewhere else) won’t work either unfortunately. Indeed after branching you will need to remove the debian/ dir from upstream and when you will merge upstream with master you will be merging the removal as well, bad idea.

By myself I’ve found some horrifying solutions involving using git-filter-branch on the upstream branch merged from master and then squashing all the history of that branch with git-rebase, but they are so horrible that I won’t mention them here more than this.

The nice solution came from a hint by madduck on the creation of branches without ancestry. Here is the complete recipe (assumed to be run from the master branch of the repo, before creating any upstream branch):

$ git-symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/upstream
$ git rm --cached -r .
$ git commit --allow-empty -m 'initial upstream branch'
$ git checkout -f master
$ git merge upstream
$ git-import-orig --no-dch ../foo_1.2.3.orig.tar.gz

In short: you should create an upstream branch without any ancestry, in it you should create an empty commit, then merge it (vacuously) in master, and now you’re ready to call git-import-orig to the rescue.

Feature request on git-buildpackage to support this out of the box is on the go: bug #471560.

Posted Wed 19 Mar 2008 15:51:06 UTC Tags: ?zack
madduck's vcs-pkg-related blog posts vcs-pkg meeting in Extremadura?

If you are interested in using version control for distro packaging, you

If you read the mailing list, you know about the upcoming Extremadura meeting 2-6 April 2008.

If this is news to you, well, it isn’t anymore.

If you think you should be in Extremadura when this party takes place, don’t hesitate and reply. The message ID is 20080311193428.GA25745@piper.oerlikon.madduck.net.

Update: mostly due to the short notice, I had to call off the meeting. I will make a run for the next slot and hopefully announce it a lot earlier.

Posted Tue 11 Mar 2008 23:27:57 UTC Tags: ?madduck
Consolidating packaging workflows across distros

I speculate that most of what we do for Debian squares with what others do for their respective distro. Thus, it should be possible to identify a conceptual workflow applicable to all distros, consolidate individual workflows on a per-package basis, and profit from each other. Jonathan let me have the after-afternoon-coffee slot of the Distro Summit for an impromptu discussion on the various workflows used by distros for packaging.

The discussion round was very short-notice and despite the announcement sent to the conference mailing list, only ten people showed up: two people familiar with Fedora, and (“versus”) eight Debianites.

Regardless, I think the discussion was success- and fruitful. We were able to identify a one-to-one mapping between the Fedora and Debian workflows, even though we use different techniques:

Many Debian package maintainers use version control systems to maintain the ./debian directory, and if patch files are stored in ./debian/patches/, then Debian and Fedora both store patch files in a version control repository, which seems awful.

Just as I am only one of many who are experimenting with VCS-based workflows for Debian packaging, the Fedora people are also considering the use of version control for packaging. Unlike Fedora, who seem to try to standardise on bzr, I try to cater for the plethora of version control systems in use in Debian, anticipating the impossibility of standardising/converging on a single tool across the entire project.

Update: Toshio Kuratomi wrote in to tell that Fedora has not settled on bzr: “the things that have been tried have spanned most of the current major vcs’s (darcs being the one exception due to it’s not meeting our requirements for keeping history intact.)”

It seems that our two projects are both at the start of a new phase in packaging, a “paradigm shift”. What better time could there be for us to listen to each other and come up with a workflow that works for both projects?

My suggestion currently centres around a common repository for each package across all (participating) distros, and feature branches. Specifically, given an upstream source tree, modifications made during packaging for a given distro fall into four categories:

Given a version control system with sufficient branching support, I imagine having different namespaces for branches: upstream-patches/*, distro/*, rpm/* or debian/*. Now, when building the Debian package, I’d apply upstream-patches/*, distro/*, deb/* and debian/* in order, while my colleague from the Fedora project would apply upstream-patches/*, distro/*, rpm/* and fedora/*, before calling the build tools and uploading the package.

There are surely problems to be overcome. Pascal Hakim mentioned patch dependencies, and I can’t necessarily say with a clear conscience that my workflow isn’t too complicated to be unleashed into the public… yet. But if we find a conceptual workflow applicable to more than one distro, it should be possible to implement a higher-level tool to implement it.

Also, the above is basically patch maintenance, not the entire workflow. Bug tracking system integration is going to play a role, as well as other aspects of daily distro packaging. I’ll leave those for future time.

For me, this is the start of a potentially fruitful cooperation and I hope that interested parties from other distros jump on. For now, I suggest my mailing list for discussion. You can also find some links on the Debian wiki.

?tag madduck ?meta title=”Consolidating packaging workflows across distros” ? [[meta author=”madduck’s vcs-pkg-related blog posts”]] ? Posted Tue 29 Jan 2008 06:30:14 UTC
Converting a package to Git

Previously, I demonstrated a Debian packaging workflow using Git and I mentioned the possibility of a follow-up post; well, here it is: you want to use my workflow (or one that’s related) for a package that is currently maintained with Subversion on svn.debian.org and you’d like to keep the history during the conversion.

Make sure to read the previous post before this one.

I am again using the example of mdadm since its Git packaging repository is in a state of shambles and I want to restart to get it right and import the history from the previous Subversion repository. What better way than to write a blog post as I do so? Well, plenty actually. This kind of post isn’t really made for a blog, and I have started work on setting up ikiwiki on madduck.net, but it’s not yet ready, so I’ll stick with the blog for now. I will make sure that links don’t break as I move content over, so feel free to bookmark this…

Importing the package into Git

Thanks to git-svn, the initial step of getting your package imported into Git is a breeze:

$ git-svn clone --stdlayout --no-metadata \
    svn+ssh://svn.debian.org/svn/pkg-mdadm/mdadm mdadm

Sit back and enjoy. If that command exits prematurely with an error such as the following:

Malformed network data: Malformed network data at /usr/local/bin/git-svn line 1029

then you should upgrade to a newer Git version, or have a look here. If your Git does not know --stdlayout then upgrade as well (or use -T trunk -t tags -b branches instead).

Sam Vilain notes that it is important to “get the attribution right with the final SVN import - getting the authors map right. I didn’t do that. If you look at the repository resulting from the above command, you’ll notice strange commit authors, such as madduck@some-unique-uuid-from-svn. git-svn allows you to map these to real names with real email addresses, which ensures that the attributions are good for the whole world to see.

When done, switch to the repository and run git-branch -r. As you’ll see, git-svn imported all SVN branches and tags as remote branches. You need those if you want to bidirectionally track the Subversion repository, but we are converting, as you may have guessed by the --no-metadata switch above.

Therefore, we resort to the Dinosaur method of converting branches to tags, which I’ll simplify for mdadm. We also just delete all remote branches after tagging, since mdadm never used branches in the SVN repository. Your mileage may vary.

git branch -r | sed -rne 's, *tags/([^@]+)$,\1,p' | while read tag; do
  echo "git tag debian/$tag tags/${tag}^; git branch -r -d tags/$tag"
done

git branch -r | while read tag; do
  echo "git branch -r -d $tag"
done

If that seems to work alright, then you can execute the commands.

Sam Vilain (again) hints me at git-pack-refs and then to edit .git/packed-refs with an editor. This certainly leaves more room for errors but might be significantly faster.

Cleaning up the SVN references

Even though we passed --no-metadata to git-svn, it did leave some traces in .git/, which we can now safely remove:

$ git config --remove-section svn-remote.svn
$ rm -r .git/svn

Setting things straight

You can skip this section unless you want to know a bit about how to fix up stuff with Git.

There was actually some nasty tagging errors leading up to the 2.5.6-9 release for etch and I could never be bothered to fix those in SVN, but now I can (I love Git!):

$ git tag -d debian/2.5.6-10            # never existed
$ git tag -f debian/2.5.6-8 2.5.6-8~2   # mistagged
$ git checkout -b maint/etch 2.5.6-8    # this is when we diverged
$ git apply < /tmp/mdadm-2.5.6-8..2.5.6-9.diff
$ git add debian/po/gl.po debian/po/pt.po debian/changelog
$ git commit -s
$ git tag debian/2.5.6-9

Now that that’s fixed, there is one other thing to worry about, namely the very last commit to SVN, which obsoletes the repository and points to the Git repository. But that’s not all of it. I was also silly enough to include a fix in the same commit. Let’s see what Git can do. Since the process of obsoletion involves all but adding a file, we can simply --amend the last commit and provide a new log message:

$ git checkout master
$ git rm OBSOLETE debian/OBSOLETE
$ git commit --amend

Now the repository is in an acceptable state.

Making ends meet

The pkg-mdadm effort on svn.debian.org only maintained the ./debian/ directory, separate from the upstream code, and boy was that a bad idea. Just to give one example: think about what’s involved in preparing a Debian-specific patch against the upstream code… this has to end, and we can make it end right here; let’s import upstream’s code (again not using his ADSL line, but the upstream branch of the pkg-mdadm Git repository; see the previous post for details):

$ git remote add upstream-repo git://git.debian.org/git/pkg-mdadm/mdadm
$ git config remote.upstream-repo.fetch \
    +refs/heads/upstream:refs/remotes/upstream-repo/upstream
$ git fetch upstream-repo
$ git checkout -b upstream upstream-repo/master

Now we have two unconnected ancestries in our repository, and it’s time to join them together. The most logical way seems to be to use the last upstream tag for which we have a Debian tag: 2.6.2.

For this, we branch off the corresponding Debian tag (2.6.2-1) and merge upstream’s 2.6.2 tag into the new branch. This will be a temporary branch Then, we rebase (remember, nothing has been published yet) the master branch on top of this temporary branch, before we end that branch’s short life. The Debian tag stays where it is since it describes the state of the repository at time of the release of 2.6.2-1.

$ git checkout -b tmp/join debian/2.6.2-1
$ git merge mdadm-2.6.2

$ git rebase tmp/join master
$ git branch -d tmp/join

It just so happens that the head of the SVN repository, which is identical to the tip of our master branch, corresponds to Debian release 2.6.2-2, so we tag it:

$ git tag debian/2.6.2-2

We are now also “born” in the sense that maintenance in Git has started. Let’s mark that point in history. There is no real reason I can foresee for this yet, but nonetheless:

$ git tag -s git-birth

Turning dpatch files into feature branches

We want to turn dpatch files into feature branches and we somehow make it “proper”. We could branch, apply the patch, delete the patch file, checkout master and delete the patch file there as well, but that appears “improper” to me at least; so instead, we’ll cherry-pick:

$ git checkout -b deb/conffile-location
$ debian/patches/01-mdadm.conf-location.dpatch -apply
$ git rm debian/patches/01-mdadm.conf-location.dpatch
$ git commit -s
$ git commit -s $(git ls-files --others --modified)

I should quickly intervene to make sure you are following. I am making use of Git’s index here. Applying the patch makes the changes in the working tree, but we did not tell Git that we want those to be part of the commit just yet. Instead, we delete the dpatch with git-rm, which automatically registers the deletion with the index. Thus, the first git-commit creates a commit which deletes the dpatch, while the second git-commit creates a commit with all the changes from the dpatch, using git-ls-files to identify new and modified files.

But for now, let’s move on. We have two commits in the deb/conffile-location branch, and one of those is relevant to the master branch, we cherry-pick it:

$ git cherry-pick deb/conffile-location^

If you’re confused, let me explain: our goal is to have a number of feature branches, of which master is the one in which most of ./debian/ is maintained. All the branches later come together in the long-living build branch, so deb/conffile-location will never be merged back into master. However, once we applied the dpatch to the feature branch, we can delete it from there and the master branch. By cherry-picking, we “import” the deletion to the master branch.

I repeat the same procedure for deb/docs, merging all the documentation-related dpatches, but I’ll spare you the details.

… and then Git let me down

In the next step, I found I had misunderstood Git merging: I thought Git was smart, but Linus had his reasons for calling Git the “stupid content tracker” (more on that later). Read on as I am obsoleting dpatch files that upstream had merged: 99-*-FIX.dpatch.

For consistency, I wanted to cherry-pick each of the appropriate upstream commits into the master branch along with deleting the corresponding dpatch file. Here is one example: 99-monitor-6+10-FIX.dpatch was obsoleted by upstream’s commit 66f8bbb; the -x records the original commit ID in the log:

$ git cherry-pick -x 66f8bbb
$ git rm debian/patches/99-monitor-6+10-FIX.dpatch
$ git commit -s -m"remove dpatch obsoleted by $(git rev-parse --short HEAD)"

I repeated the procedure for the other dpatch files, removed the dpatch infrastructure, and then went on to merge it all into build to build the package.

The build branch is a long-living branch off upstream, but which upstream? I’ll fast-forward you past a segfault problem with mdadm, which upstream (thought to have) resolved with commit 23dc1ae after 2.6.3, but he had not yet released 2.6.4. Looking at the commits between 23dc1ae and upstream’s HEAD at the time, I decided to include them all and snapshot 4450e59:

$ git fetch upstream-repo
$ git checkout upstream
$ git merge upstream-repo
$ git tag mdadm-2.6.3+200709292116+4450e59 4450e59

$ git checkout master
$ git merge --no-commit mdadm-2.6.3+200709292116+4450e59
$ dch -v mdadm-2.6.3+200709292116+4450e59-1
$ git add debian/changelog
$ git commit -s

And then I called poor-mans-gitbuild, which merges master and then deb/* into build. Here is when stuff blew up.

I’ll make a long story short (read my description of the problem and Linus’ answer if you want to know more): I thought Git was smart to identify merges common to both branches and do the right thing, but it turn out that Git does not care at all about commits, it only worries about content and the end result. In our case, unfortunately (or fortunately), the outcome meant a conflict because the upstream branch introduced a simple change (last hunk) in the lines surrounding the patch we cherry-picked, and Git can’t handle it.

The solution is not to cherry-pick, to cherry-pick all commits touching the context of the dpatch, or to simply merge upstream into all out feature branches. In our case, the first is the easiest solution and since importing dpatch files is a one-time thing (thank $DEITY), I’ll leave it at that.

Almost.

I have spent two days thinking about this more than I should have. And it was this point Linus made which made me appreciate Git even more:

Conflicts aren’t bad - they’re good. Trying to aggressively resolve them automatically when two branches have done slightly different things in the same area is stupid and just results in more problems. Instead, git tries to do what I don’t think anybody else has done: make the conflicts easy to resolve, by allowing you to work with them in your normal working tree, and still giving you a lot of tools to help you see what’s going on.

The end

This concludes today’s report. Importing the changes from the old Git repo, tagging and merging the branches is all covered in my previous post, or at least you’ll find enough information there to complete the exercise.

I would like to specifically thank Sam Vilain and Linus Torvalds for their help in preparing this post, as well as the #git/freenode inhabitants, as always.

If you are interested in the topic of using version control for distro packaging, I invite you to join the vcs-pkg mailing list and/or the #vcs-pkg/irc.oftc.net IRC channel.

Also, if you are interested in Git in general, you can find a list of blog posts on the Git wiki.

NP: The Police: Zenyatta Mondatta

?tag madduck ?meta title=”Converting a package to Git” ? [[meta author=”madduck’s vcs-pkg-related blog posts”]] ? Posted Sun 14 Oct 2007 14:30:10 UTC
Packaging with Git

Introduction

I gave a joint presentation with Manoj at Debconf7 about using distributed version control for Debian packaging, and I volunteered to do an on-line workshop about using Git for the task, so it’s about time that I should know how to use Git for Debian packaging, but it turns out that I don’t. Or well, didn’t.

After I made a pretty good mess out of the mdadm packaging repository (which is not a big problem as it’s just ugly history up to the point when I start to get it right), I decided to get down with the topic and figure it out once and for all. I am writing this post as I put the pieces together. It’s been cooking for a week, simply so I could gather enough feedback. I am aware that Git is not exactly a showcase of usability, so I took some extra care to not add to the confusion.

It may be the first post in a series, because this time, I am just covering the case of mdadm, for which upstream also uses Git and where I am the only maintainer, and I shall pretend that I am importing mdadm to version control for the first time, so there won’t be any history juggling. Future posts could well include tracking Subversion repositories with git-svn, and importing packages previously tracked therewith.

I realise that git-buildpackage exists, but imposes a rather strict branch layout and tagging scheme, which I don’t want to adhere to. And gitpkg (Romain blogged about it recently), deserves another look since, according to its author, it does not impose anything on its user. But in any case, before using such tools (and possibly extending them to allow for other layouts), I’d really rather have done it by hand a couple of times to get the hang of it and find out where the culprits lie.

Now, enough of the talking, just one last thing: I expect this blog post to change quite a bit as I get feedback. Changes shall be highlighted in bold typeface.

Setting up the infrastructure

First, we prepare a shared repository on git.debian.org for later use (using collab-maint for illustration purposes), download the Debian source package we want to import (version 2.6.3+200709292116+4450e59-3 at time of writing, but I pretend it’s -2 because we shall create -3 further down…), set up a local repository, and link it to the remote repository. Note that there are other ways to set up the infrastructure, but this happens to be the one I prefer, even though it’s slightly more complicated:

$ ssh alioth
$ cd /git/collab-maint
$ ./setup-repository pkg-mdadm mdadm Debian packaging
$ exit
$ apt-get source --download-only mdadm
$ mkdir mdadm && cd mdadm
$ git init
$ git remote add origin ssh://git.debian.org/git/collab-maint/pkg-mdadm
$ git config branch.master.remote origin
$ git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master

Now we can use git-pull and git-push, except the remote repository is empty and we can’t pull from there yet. We’ll save that for later.

Instead, we tell the repository about upstream’s Git repository. I am giving you the git.debian.org URL though, simply because I don’t want upstream repository (which lives on an ADSL line) hammered in response to this blog post:

$ git remote add upstream-repo git://git.debian.org/git/pkg-mdadm/mdadm

Since we’re using the upstream branch of the pkg-mdadm repository as source (and don’t want all the other mess I created in that repository), we’ll first limit the set of branches to be fetched (I could have used the -t option in the above git-remote command, but I prefer to make it explicit that we’re doing things slightly differently to protect upstream’s ADSL line).

$ git config remote.upstream-repo.fetch \
    +refs/heads/upstream:refs/remotes/upstream-repo/upstream

And now we can pull down upstream’s history and create a local branch off it. The “no common commits” warning can be safely ignored since we don’t have any commits at all at that point (so there can’t be any in common between the local and remote repository), but we know what we’re doing, even to the point that we can forcefully give birth to a branch, which is because we do not have a HEAD commit yet (our repository is still empty):

$ git fetch upstream-repo
warning: no common commits
[…]
  # in the real world, we'd be branching off upstream-repo/master
$ git checkout -b upstream upstream-repo/upstream
warning: You appear to be on a branch yet to be born.
warning: Forcing checkout of upstream-repo/upstream.
Branch upstream set up to track remote branch
  refs/remotes/upstream-repo/upstream.
$ git branch
* upstream
$ ls | wc -l
77

Importing the Debian package

Now it’s time to import Debian’s diff.gz — remember how I pretend to use version control for package maintenance for the first time. Oh, and sorry about the messy file names, but I decided it’s best to stick with real data in case you are playing along:

Since we’re applying the diff against version 2.6.3+200709292116+4450e59, we ought to make sure to have the repository at the same state. Upstream never “released” that version, but I encoded the commit ID of the tip when I snapshotted it: 4450e59, so we branch off there. Since we are actually tracking the git.debian.org pkg-mdadm repository instead of upstream, you can use the tag I made. Otherwise you could consider tagging yourself:

$ #git tag -s mdadm-2.6.3+200709292116+4450e59 4450e59
$ git checkout -b master mdadm-2.6.3+200709292116+4450e59
$ zcat ../mdadm_2.6.3+200709292116+4450e59-2.diff.gz | git apply

The local tree is now “debianised”, but Git does not know about the new and changed files, which you can verify with git-status. We will split the changes made by Debian’s diff.gz across several branches.

The idea of feature branches

We could just create a debian branch, commit all changes made by the diff.gz there, and be done with it. However, we might want to keep certain aspects of Debianisation separate, and the way to do that is with feature branches (also known as “topic” branches). For the sake of this demonstration, let’s create the following four branches in addition to the master branch, which holds the standard Debian files, such as debian/changelog, debian/control, and debian/rules:

If you’re importing a Debian package using dpatch, you might want to convert every dpatch into a single branch, or at least collect logical units into separate branches. Up to you. For now, our simple example suffices. Keep in mind that it’s easy to merge two branch and less trivial to split one into two.

Why? Well, good question. As you will see further down, the separation between master and deb/initramfs actually makes things more complicated when you are working on an issue spanning across both. However, feature branches also bring a whole lot of flexibility. For instance, with the above separation, I could easily create mdadm packages without initramfs integration (see #434934), a disk-space-conscious distribution like grml might prefer to leave out the extra documentation, and maybe another derivative doesn’t like the fact that the configuration file is in a different place from upstream. With feature branches, all these issues could be easily addressed by leaving out unwanted branches from the merge into the integration/build branch (see further down).

Whether you use feature branches, and how many, or whether you’d like to only separate upstream and Debian stuff is entirely up to you. For the purpose of demonstration, I’ll go the more complicated way.

Setting up feature branches

So let’s commit the individual files to the branches. The output of the git-checkout command shows modified files that have not been committed yet (which I trim after the first example); Git keeps these across checkouts/branch changes. Note that the ./debian/ directory does not show up as Git does not know about it yet (git-status will tell you that it’s untracked, or rather: contains untracked files since Git does not track directories at all):

$ git checkout -b upstream-patches mdadm-2.6.3+200709292116+4450e59
M Makefile
M ReadMe.c
M mdadm.8
M mdadm.conf.5
M mdassemble.8
M super1.c
$ git add super1.c     #444682
$ git commit -s

  # i now branch off master, but that's the same as 4450e59 actually
  # i just do it so i can make this point…
$ git checkout -b deb/conffile-location master
$ git add Makefile ReadMe.c mdadm.8 mdadm.conf.5 mdassemble.8
$ git commit -s

$ git checkout -b deb/initramfs master
$ git add debian/initramfs/*
$ git commit -s

$ git checkout -b deb/docs master
$ git add RAID5_versus_RAID10.txt md.txt rootraiddoc.97.html
$ git commit -s

  # and finally, the ./debian/ directory:
$ git checkout master
$ chmod +x debian/rules
$ git add debian
$ git commit -s

$ git branch
  deb/conffile-location
  deb/docs
* master
  upstream
  upstream-patches

At this time, we push our work so it won’t get lost if, at this moment, aliens land on the house, or any other completely plausible event of apocalypse descends upon you. We’ll push our work to git.debian.org (the origin, which is the default destination and thus needs not be specified) by using git-push --all, which conveniently pushes all local branches, thus including the upstream code; you may not want to push the upstream code, but I prefer it since it makes it easier to work with the repository, and since most of the objects are needed for the other branches anyway — after all, we branched off the upstream branch.

Specifying --tags instead of --all pushes tags instead of heads (branches); you couldn’t have guessed that! See this thread if you (rightfully) think that one should be able to do this in a single command (which is not git push refs/heads/* refs/tags/*)…

$ git push --all
$ git push --tags

Done. Well, almost…

Building the package (theory)

Let’s build the package. There seem to be two (sensible) ways we could do this, considering that we have to integrate (merge) the branches we just created, before we fire off the building scripts:

  1. by using a temporary (or “throw-away”) branch off upstream, where we integrate all the branches we have just created, build the package, tag our master branch (it contains debian/changelog), and remove the temporary branch. When a new package needs to be built, we repeat the process.

  2. by using a long-living integration branch off upstream, into which we merge all our branches, tag the branch, and build the package off the tag. When a new package comes around, we re-merge our branches, tag, and build.

Both approaches have a certain appeal to me, but I settled for the second, for two reasons, the first of which leads to the second:

  1. When I upload a package to the Debian archive, I want to create a tag which captures the exact state of the tree from which the package was built, for posterity (I will return to this point later). Since the throw-away branches are not designed to persist and are not uploaded to the archive, tagging the merging commit makes no sense. Thus, the only way to properly identify a source tree across all involved branches would be to run git-tag $branch/$tagname $branch for each branch, which is purely semantic and will get messy sooner or later.

  2. As a result of the above: when Debian makes a new stable release, I would like to create a branch corresponding to the package in the stable archive at the time, for security and other proposed updates. I could rename my throw-away branch, if it still existed, or I could create a new branch and merge all other branches, using the (semantic) tags, but that seems rather unfavourable.

So instead, I use a long-living integration branch, notoriously tag the merge commits which produced the tree from which I built the package I uploaded, and when a certain version ends up in a stable Debian release, I create a maintenance branch off the one, single tag which corresponds to the very version of the package distributed as part of the Debian release.

So much for the theory. Let’s build, already!

Building the package (practise)

So we need a long-living integration branch, and that’s easier done than said:

$ git checkout -b build mdadm-2.6.3+200709292116+4450e59

Now we’re ready to build, and the following procedure should really be automated. I thus write it like a script, called poor-mans-gitbuild, which takes as optional argument the name of the (upstream) tag to use, defaulting to upstream (the tip):

#!/bin/sh
set -eu
git checkout master
debver=$(dpkg-parsechangelog | sed -ne 's,Version: ,,p')
git checkout build
git merge ${1:-upstream}
git merge upstream-patches
git merge master
for b in $(git for-each-ref --format='%(refname)' refs/heads/deb/*); do
  git merge -- $b
done
git tag -s debian/$debver
debuild -i.git
git checkout master

Kumar Appaiah spotted that -i.git is actually needed in the debuild call to make it exclude the .git directory from the generated diff.gz.

Note how we are merging each branch in turn, instead of using the octopus merge strategy (which would create a commit with more than two parents) for reasons outlined in this post. An octopus-merge would actually work in our situation, but it will not always work, so better safe than sorry (although you could still achieve the same result).

If you discover during the build that you forgot something, or the build script failed to run, just remove the tag, undo the merges, checkout the branch to which you need to commit to fix the issue, and then repeat the above build process:

$ git tag -d debian/$debver
$ git checkout build
$ git reset --hard upstream
$ git checkout master
$ editor debian/rules    # or whatever
$ git add debian/rules
$ git commit -s

$ poor-mans-gitbuild

Before you upload, it’s a good idea to invoke gitk --all and verify that all goes according to plan:

screenshot of gitk after the above steps

When you’re done and the package has been uploaded, push your work to git.debian.org, as before. Instead of using --all and --tags, I now specify exactly which refs to push. This is probably a good habit to get into to prevent publishing unwanted refs:

$ git push origin build tag debian/2.6.3+200709292116+4450e59-3

Now take your dog for a walk, or play outside, or do something else not involving a computer or entertainment device.

Uploading a new Debian version

If you are as lucky as I am, the package you uploaded still has a bug in the upstream code and someone else fixes it before upstream releases a new version, then you might be in the position to release a new Debian version. Or maybe you just need to make some Debian-specific changes against the same upstream version. I’ll let the commands speak for themselves:

$ git checkout upstream-patches
$ git-apply < patch-from-lunar.diff   #444682 again
$ git commit --author 'Jérémy Bobbio <lunar@debian.org>' -s

  # this should also be automated, see below
$ git checkout master
$ dch -i
$ dpkg-parsechangelog | sed -ne 's,Version: ,,p'
2.6.3+200709292116+4450e59-3
$ git commit -s debian/changelog

$ poor-mans-gitbuild

$ git push
$ git push origin tag debian/2.6.3+200709292116+4450e59-3

That first git-push may require a short explanation: without any arguments, git-push updates only the intersection of local and remote branches, so it would never push a new local branch (such as build above), but it updates all existing ones; thus, you cannot inadvertedly publish a local branch. Tags still need to be published explicitly.

Hacking on the software

Imagine: on a rainy Saturday afternoon you get bored and decide to implement a better way to tell mdadm when to start which array. Since you’re a genius, it’ll take you only a day, but you do make mistakes here and there, so what could be better than to use version control? However, rather than having a branch that will live forever, you are just creating a local branch, which you will not publish. When you are done, you’ll feed your work back into the existing branches.

Git makes branching really easy and as you may have spotted, the poor-mans-gitbuild script reserves an entire branch namespace for people like you:

$ git checkout -b tmp/start-arrays-rework master

Unfortunately (or fortunately), fixing this issue will require work on two branches, since the initramfs script and hook are maintained in a separate branch. There are (again) two ways in which we can (sensibly) approach this:

I am undecided on this, but maybe the best would be a combination: merge both into a temporary branch and later cherry-pick the commits into two additional, temporary branches until you got it right, and then fast-forward the official branches to their tips:

$ git merge master deb/initramfs
$ editor debian/mdadm-raid                     # …
$ git commit -s debian/mdadm-raid
$ editor debian/initramfs/script.local-top     # …
$ git commit -s debian/initramfs/script.local-top
[many hours of iteration pass…]

[… until you are done]
$ git checkout -b tmp/start-arrays-rework-init master
  # for each commit $c in tmp/start-arrays-rework
  # applicable to the master branch:
$ git cherry-pick $c
$ git checkout -b tmp/start-arrays-rework-initramfs deb/initramfs
  # for each commit $c in tmp/start-arrays-rework
  # applicable to the deb/initramfs branch:
$ git cherry-pick $c

This is assuming that all your commits are logical units. If you find several commits which would better be bundled together into a single commit, this is the time to do it:

$ git cherry-pick --no-commit <commit7>
$ git cherry-pick --no-commit <commit4>
$ git cherry-pick --no-commit <commit5>
$ git commit -s

Before we now merge this into the official branches, let me briefly intervene and introduce the concept of a fast-forward. Git will “fast-forward” a branch to a new tip if it decides that no merge is needed. In the above example, we branched a temporary branch (T) off the tip of an official branch (O) and then worked on the temporary one. If we now merge the temporary one into the official one, Git determines that it can actually squash the ancestry into a single line and push the official branch tip to the same ref as the temporary branch tip. In cheap (poor man’s), ASCII notation:

- - - O             >> merge T >>     - - - = - - OT
       ` - - T      >>  into O >>

This works because no new commits have been made on top of O (if there would be any, we might be able to rebase, but let’s not go there quite yet; rebasing is how you shoot yourself in the foot with Git). Thus we can simply do the following:

$ git checkout deb/initramfs
$ git merge tmp/start-arrays-rework-initramfs
$ git checkout master
$ git merge tmp/start-arrays-rework-init

and test/build/push the result. Or well, since you are not an mdadm maintainer (We\^W I have open job positions! Applications welcome!), you’ll want to submit your work as patches via email:

$ git format-patch -s -M origin/master

This will create a number of files in the current directory, one corresponding for each commit you made since origin/master. Assuming each commit is a logical unit, you can now submit these to an email address. The --compose option lets you write an introductory message, which is optional:

$ git send-email --compose --to your@email.address <file1> <file2> <…>

Once you’ve verified that everything is alright, swap your email address for the bug number (or the pkg-mdadm-devel list address).

Thanks (in advance) for your contribution!

Of course, you may also be working on a feature that you want to go upstream, in which case you’d probably branch off upstream-patches (if it depends on a patch not yet in upstream’s repository), or upstream (if it does not):

$ git checkout -b tmp/cool-feature upstream
[…]

… when a new upstream version comes around

After a while, upstream may have integrated your patches, in addition to various other changes, to give birth to mdadm-2.6.4. We thus first fetch all the new refs and merge them into our upstream branch:

$ git fetch upstream-repo
$ git checkout upstream
$ git merge upstream-repo/master

we could just as well have executed git-pull, which with the default configuration would have done the same; however, I prefer to separate the process into fetching and merging.

Now comes the point when many Git people think about rebasing. And in fact, rebasing is exactly what you should be doing, iff you’re still working on an unpublished branch, such as the previous tmp/cool-feature off upstream. By rebasing your branch onto the updated upstream branch, you are making sure that your patch will apply cleanly when upstream tries it, because potential merge conflicts would be handled by you as part of the rebase, rather than by upstream:

$ git checkout tmp/cool-feature
$ git rebase upstream

What rebasing does is quite simple actually: it takes every commit you made since you branched off the parent branch and records the diff and commit message. Then, for each diff/commit_message pair, it creates a new commit on top of the new parent branch tip, thus rewrites history, and orphans all your original commits. Thus, you should only do this if your branch has never been published or else you would leave people who cloned from your published branch with orphans.

If this still does not make sense, try it out: create a (source) repository, make a commit (with a meaningful commit message), branch B off the tip, make a commit on top of B (with a meaningful message), clone that repository and return to the source repository. There, checkout the master, make a commit (with a …), checkout B, rebase it onto the tip of master, make a commit (with a …), and now git-pull from the clone; use gitk to figure out what’s going on.

So you should almost never rebase a published branch, and since all your branches outside of the tmp/* namespace are published on git.debian.org, you should not rebase those.

But then again, Pierre actually rebases a published branch in his workflow, and he does so with reason: his patches branch is just a collection of branches to go upstream, from which upstream cherry-picks or which upstream merges, but which no one tracks (or should be tracking).

But we can’t (or at least will not at this point) do this for our feature branches (though we could treat upstream-patches that way), so we have to merge. At first, it suffices to merge the new upstream into the long-living build branch, and to call poor-mans-gitbuild, but if you run into merge conflicts or find that upstream’s changes affect the functionality contained in your feature branches, you need to actually fix those.

For instance, let’s say that upstream started providing md.txt (which I previously provided in the deb/docs branch), then I need to fix that branch:

$ git checkout deb/docs
$ git rm md.txt
$ git commit -s

That was easy, since I could evade the conflict. But what if upstream made a change to Makefile, which got in the way with my configuration file location change? Then I’d have to merge upstream into deb/conffile-location, resolve the conflicts, and commit the change:

$ git checkout deb/conffile-location
$ git merge upstream
CONFLICT!
$ git-mergetool
$ git commit -s

When all conflicts have been resolved, I can prepare a new release, as before:

$ git checkout master
$ dch -i
$ dpkg-parsechangelog | sed -ne 's,Version: ,,p'
2.6.3+200709292116+4450e59-3
# git commit -s debian/changelog

$ poor-mans-gitbuild

# git push
$ git push origin tag debian/2.6.3+200709292116+4450e59-3

Note that Git often appears smart about commits that percolated upstream: since upstream included the two commits in upstream-patches in his 2.6.4 release, my upstream-patches branch got effectively annihilated, and Git was smart enough to figure that out without a conflict. But before you rejoice, let it be told that this does not always work.

Creating and using a maintenance branch

Let’s say Debian “lenny” is released with mdadm 2.7.6-1, then:

$ git checkout -b maint/lenny debian/2.7.6-1

You might do this to celebrate the release, or you may wait until the need arises. We’ve already left the domain of reality (“lenny” is not yet released), so the following is just theory.

Now, assume that a security bug is found in mdadm 2.7.6 after “lenny” was released. Upstream is already on mdadm 2.7.8 and commits deadbeef and c0ffee fix the security issue, then you’d cherry-pick them into the maint/lenny branch:

$ git checkout upstream
$ git pull
$ git checkout maint/lenny
$ git cherry-pick deadbeef
$ git cherry-pick c0ffee

If there are no merge conflicts (which you’d resolve with git-mergetool), we can just go ahead to prepare the new package:

$ dch -i
$ dpkg-parsechangelog | sed -ne 's,Version: ,,p'
2.7.6-1lenny1
$ git commit -s debian/changelog

$ poor-mans-gitbuild

$ git push origin maint/lenny
$ git push origin tag debian/2.7.6-1lenny1

Future directions

It should be trivial to create the Debian source package directly from the repository, and in fact, in response to a recent blog post of mine on the dispensability of pristine upstream tarballs, two people showed me their scripts to do it.

My post also caused Joey Hess to clarify his position on pristine tarballs, before he went out to implement dpkg-source v3. This looks very promising.

Yet, as Romain argues, there are benefits with simple patch management systems. Exciting times ahead!

In addition to creating source packages from version control, a couple of other ideas have been around for a while:

And I am sure there are more. If you have any, I’d be interested to hear about them!

Wrapping up

I hope this post was useful. Thank you for reading to the end, this was probably my longest blog post ever.

I want to thank Pierre Habouzit, Johannes Schindelin, and all the others on the #git/freenode IRC channel for their tutelage. Thanks also to Manoj Srivastava, whose pioneering work on packaging with GNU arch got me started on most of the concepts I use in the above. And of course, the members of the the vcs-pkg mailing list for the various discussions on this subject, especially those who participated in the thread leading up to this post. Finally, thanks to Linus and Junio for Git and the continuously outstanding high level of support they give.

If you are interested in the topic of using version control for distro packaging, I invite you to join the vcs-pkg mailing list and/or the #vcs-pkg/irc.oftc.net IRC channel.

NP: Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works, Volume 2 (at least when I started writing…)

?tag madduck ?meta title=”Packaging with Git” ? [[meta author=”madduck’s vcs-pkg-related blog posts”]] ? Posted Wed 10 Oct 2007 19:46:22 UTC
zack's vcs related blog posts debcheckout bits

debcheckout: some new bits

Some new bits about debcheckout (talk is cheap, code here):

(Perl) Tip of the day: Switch.pm

With “use Switch;” you will win a switch statement for your Perl programs, which can be used as follows:

switch ($repo_type) {
  case "cvs"  { my $module = pop @cmd; push @cmd, ("-d", $destdir, $module); }
  case /^(bzr|darcs|git|hg|svn)$/
              { push @cmd, $destdir; }
  else { die "sorry, don't know how to set the destination directory for $repo_type repositories (patches welcome!)\n"; }
}

This is far better than a chain of if/elsif statements and has even a sane semantics (e.g. no need of explicit breaks, possibility to have higher-case branches, …). Unfortunately, it is not possible (using a simple syntax) to match a scalar value against an array case branch. Therefore the only way to factorize branches is (when possible) to rely on regexp alternative branches, as it is done in the code snippet above.

Posted Fri 17 Aug 2007 08:13:04 UTC Tags: ?zack
zack's vcs related blog posts debcheckout

Introducing debcheckout

Cute little tiny teeny new addition to devscripts: debcheckout (not yet uploaded though, in the mean time you can get it from here. It checks out the versioning repository used to maintain a given package.

Sample usage:

$ debcheckout devscripts
declared svn repository at svn://svn.debian.org/devscripts/trunk
svn co svn://svn.debian.org/devscripts/trunk ...
A    trunk/debian
A    trunk/debian/control
A    trunk/debian/links
A    trunk/debian/dirs
A    trunk/debian/compat
<snip>
 U   trunk
Checked out revision 749.
$

The information about where to find a repository is extracted parsing (in a rather dumb way actually, but I really can’t stand libapt-pkg API!) Vcs-XXX fields.

Intended usages:

  1. NMU scenarios: when you’re NMUing, please commit your patches (if possible of course: directly to the repository if it has already adhered to the [[!open your VCS campaign|DDwidecommitonalioth]] I’m sponsoring, or somewhere else if you’re using a distributed VCS); with debcheckout the first step it’s easy

  2. ease the creation of patches: isn’t it better to checkout a repository, fiddle around, and then just invoke svn (or whatever) diff instead of remembering (I always forgot that!) to first create a .orig copy of the debianized source tree?

  3. retrieving the bleeding edge version of a package which includes the patch for a pending bug you have been waiting for ages

RFC

Let me know what you think of debcheckout, feature requests, whatever. In particular let me know if I did something wrong using some VCS, since I’m not proficient in all VCSs supported by debcheckout; for example: I’m quite sure the Arch part is not working … help is appreciated!

Vcs-Cvs proposed convention

debcheckout can also give the ground for standardizing the VCS-specific meanings of the various Vcs-XXX fields. In writing it I’ve noticed that almost all VCSs have de facto standards about what to put in the field, with the notable exception of CVS. That’s probably because all modern VCSs rely on some URL-like identifier for a repository location, while CVS does not. It needs a pair URL/module to be checkout.

The format I’m currently supporting in debcheckout is a pair of space separated values “CVSROOT MODULENAME”; later on I’m using those values as in cvs -d CVSROOT checkout MODULENAME. Also please note that if you do not put the heading “:pserver:” string in the CVSROOT, users won’t be able to checkout the repository without providing a password.

Tip of the day: Pod::Usage

Perl’s Pod::Usage module is cool. Finally I can write the usage string only once instead of duplicating it in the manpage and in the string to be printed upon —help. Ruby had something similar, but the output on console was so horrible that I preferred duplicating stuff for Ruby scripts.

Update: I’ve changed the link to debcheckout.pl so that it points to the “live” version in the devscripts repository, since some patches are already flowing in …

Posted Wed 15 Aug 2007 14:14:05 UTC Tags: ?zack
Using arch for packages session over

Wow, after 2:15 hours of continuous IRC hacking, my brain is fried and at least 3-4 people followed the introduction (thanks to bignose for the editing) to Manoj’s packaging art I gave in #pkg-zope. I think it was successful, but there are lessons to be learnt:

What is good though is that as the demonstrator, you have to type everything twice — into the shell and into the IRC window. That gives the people following the demo twice as much time to try things themselves.

I think we should have more demos of this kind in our community.

Update: I had to give up the wiki on my server and the Debian admins have not yet had the time to incorporate the pages into the Debian wiki proper.

Anyway, I suggest against the use of arch, which is a bit too cumbersome. Have a look at some of the other VCS to do what you want. For instance, I just published a typescript from a recent presentation on using modern VCS for Debian packaging, in which I use git for the same workflow.

?tag madduck ?meta title=”Using arch for packages session over” ? [[meta author=”madduck’s vcs-pkg-related blog posts”]] ? Posted Thu 11 Aug 2005 21:36:28 UTC
Managing Debian packages with GNU arch

Manoj (thanks to Jaldhar, I finally know how to pronounce your name… it would be spelt “Manosch” in German and bears resemblance to the name of one of the greater German child book authors)… uh, so where was I?

Oh yeah, Manoj has a really interesting way to manage packages with GNU arch, which I have started to adopt for my packages. The approach gets rid of things like dpatch (yes!) and simply manages additional features and debianisation in separate branches. Read the last paragraph of this entry if you can’t be bothered with the rest.

Even though bazaar still has its rough edges, it’s a pleasure to work with the guys making it possible, and bugs have quick turnaround times. This is one of the reasons why I chose to adopt Manoj’s method together with bazaar for pkg-zope as well as pkg-mdadm. I have started to document the process on the pkg-zope wiki.

The only real drawback of Manoj’s method is that it has a steep learning curve. Thus, Mario (the other mdadm maintainer) and I had the idea to hold a live session on IRC in which to demonstrate the use of arch and allow people to ask questions.

We are meeting for this live demonstration and Q&A session tomorrow, Thursday 11 August 2005, at 19:00 hours GMT in the

pkg-zope channel on irc.debian.org, and you are cordially invited

to join. I’ll also log the session and make it available online afterwards. Hope to see you there.

?tag madduck ?meta title=”Managing Debian packages with GNU arch” ? [[meta author=”madduck’s vcs-pkg-related blog posts”]] ? Posted Wed 10 Aug 2005 07:57:53 UTC

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