[Monotone-debian] net.venge.monotone.debian-diff proposed policy

[Zack Weinberg]

I have just created the branch net.venge.monotone.debian-diff.  The
purpose of this branch is to hold those changes that go into the
"debian diff" for the official Debian packages of Monotone.  Most of
the packaging infrastructure (the debian/ directory) is already on
net.venge.monotone and is shipped as part of the "upstream" release
tarball (in their terms, the .orig.tar.gz) but at present there is one
small change that official Debian packages need relative to the
release tarball, and if we fix bugs in the packages in between
"upstream" releases, we need somewhere to keep them.

The proposed operating principles for this branch are:

* Commits directly to .debian-diff are allowed either to fix bugs
reported via the Debian bug tracking system
(http://bugs.debian.org/src:monotone) or to fix bugs found upstream
that are of sufficient severity that they cannot wait for the next
upstream release (security bugs, the sqlite-and-gcc-4.2 bug that we
just fixed, etc).  Unless the fix is *inappropriate* for the next
upstream release, it should be committed to both n.v.m and
n.v.m.debian-diff.  You need to update debian/changelog, on both
branches, when you make any commit to .debian-diff (even if the change
is not going on n.v.m).

* The package build machinery is not equipped to handle re-generating
anything generated by autoconf or automake.  Thus, you MUST NOT make
changes on the branch to Makefile.am, configure.ac, anything in m4/,
or anything in po/ other than a .po file.

* When making an official release, after you tag the released sources,
merge from the release tag (*not* the head of n.v.m) to the
.debian-diff branch.  I believe that's

$ mtn explicit_merge t:monotone-<VER> h:net.venge.monotone.debian-diff \
   net.venge.monotone.debian-diff

but I haven't actually tried it yet.  [If the upstream release manager
would prefer, this step can be left to the Debian maintainers.]

At no other time should n.v.m be merged into n.v.m.debian-diff.

* To make a Debian release, starting from a release tarball:  Rename
the release tarball to Debian's convention
(monotone_VERSION.orig.tar.gz).  Unpack it.  Take the diff between the
corresponding release tag and the head of n.v.m.debian-diff, and apply
it to the unpacked directory.  Proceed with dpkg-buildpackage.

(You do not simply check out the head of n.v.m.debian-diff and run
autoreconf -i, because that risks skew between the generated files in
the tarball and the generated files on the branch, which will lead to
problems.)

Alles klar?
zw