[maemo-developers] Autobuilder: building svn tags from garage

[From: Anderson Lizardo]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 6:54 AM, Ed Bartosh<bartosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm thinking about to add this feature to autobuilder. With developers
> don't need to prepare package's source and upload it to autobuilder
> queue. They just need to tag the sources.
>
> This is how i plan to implement it:
> 1. Svn hook will be creating description file or record in the
> database if new tag appears in tags/autobuilder/<product> directory
> for any garage project.
> 2. Special cron job will fetch new tag, build source package and put
> it into autobuilder incoming directory.
> 3. Autobuilder will build it the same way as it does currently.
>
> How does it look? Any ideas/suggestions?

It would be nice if it could support those projects that keep only the
debian/ directory under revision control. We do that for many PyMaemo
packages, because there is no point keeping the entire source if we
are only touching the debian packaging. Then we currently using some
scripts that generate the source packages for us (and even build
locally for testing).

One idea might be to use some custom field in debian/control (see
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s5.7)
that point to the original .dsc file in Debian, e.g.:

XC-Original-Dsc:
http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/d/dbus-python/dbus-python_0.83.0-1.dsc

Then in case the autobuilder would simply do:

dget <url_to_dsc>
dpkg-source -x *.dsc
rm -rf */debian
cp -a /path/to/debian */debian

The reason it should not point simply to the orig tarball is that some
(misbehaved IMHO) packages keep changes directly on the sources, that
are applied only when the diff.gz is applied with dpkg-source.

BTW git support would be nice.

Regards,
-- 
Anderson Lizardo
OpenBossa Labs - INdT
Manaus - Brazil