Git packaging workflow

Seeing what has been posted recently in planet.d.o, I would like to share as well my thoughts and work-flow, and tell that I do agree with Joey Hess on many of his arguments. Especially when he tells that Debian fetishises upstream tarballs. We’re in 2013, at the age of Internet, and more and more upstream authors are using Git, and more and more they don’t care about releasing tarballs. I’ve seen some upstream authors who simply stopped doing so completely, as a Git tag is really enough. I also fully agree than disk space and network speed isn’t much of a problem these days.

When there are tags available, I use the following debian/gbp.conf:

[DEFAULT]
upstream-branch = master
debian-branch = debian
upstream-tag = %(version)s
compression = xz
[git-buildpackage]
export-dir = ../build-area/

On many of my packages, I now just use Git tags from upstream if they are available. To make it more easy, I now nearly always use the following piece of code in my debian/rules files:

DEBVERS ?= $(shell dpkg-parsechangelog | sed -n -e 's/^Version: //p')
VERSION ?= $(shell echo '$(DEBVERS)' | sed -e 's/^[[:digit:]]*://' -e 's/[-].*//')
DEBFLAVOR ?= $(shell dpkg-parsechangelog | grep -E ^Distribution: | cut -d" " -f2)
DEBPKGNAME ?= $(shell dpkg-parsechangelog | grep -E ^Source: | cut -d" " -f2)
DEBIAN_BRANCH ?= $(shell cat debian/gbp.conf | grep debian-branch | cut -d'=' -f2 | awk '{print 1ドル}')
GIT_TAG ?= $(shell echo '$(VERSION)' | sed -e 's/~/_/')
get-upstream-sources:
 git remote add upstream git://git.example.org/proj/foo.git || true
 git fetch upstream
 if ! git checkout master ; then \
 echo "No upstream branch: checking out" ; \
 git checkout -b master upstream/master ; \
 fi
 git checkout $(DEBIAN_BRANCH)
make-orig-file:
 if [ ! -f ../$(DEBPKGNAME)_$(VERSION).orig.tar.xz ] ; then \
 git archive --prefix=$(DEBPKGNAME)-$(GIT_TAG)/ $(GIT_TAG) | xz >../$(DEBPKGNAME)_$(VERSION).orig.tar.xz ; \
 fi
 [ ! -e ../build-area ] && mkdir ../build-area || true
 [ ! -e ../build-area/$(DEBPKGNAME)_$(VERSION).orig.tar.xz ] && cp ../$(DEBPKGNAME)_$(VERSION).orig.tar.xz ../build-area || true

Packaging a new upstream VERSION now means that I only have to edit the debian/changelog, do ./debian/rules get-upstream-source so that I get new commits and tags, then “git merge -X theirs VERSION” to import the changes, then finally invoke ./debian/rules make-orig-file to create the orig.tar.xz. My debian branch is now ready for git-buildpackage. Note that the sed with the GIT_TAG thing is there because unfortunately, Git doesn’t support the ~ char in tags, and that most of the time, upstream do not use _ in version numbers. Let’s say upstream is releasing version 1.2.3rc1, then I simply do “git tag 1.2.3_rc1 1.2.3rc1” so that I have a new tag which points to the same commit as 1.2.3rc1, but that can be used for the Debian 1.2.3~rc1-1 release and the make-orig-file.

All this might looks overkill at first, but in fact it is really convenient and efficient. Also, even though there is a master branch above, it isn’t needed to build the package. Git is smarter than this, so even if you haven’t checked out upstream master branch from the “upstream” remote, make-orig-file and git-buildpackage will simply continue to work. Which is cool, because this means you can store a single branch on Alioth (which is what I do).

This entry was written by Goirand Thomas , posted on April 4, 2013 at 11:31 am, filed under Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

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