launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Robert Collins <robertc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I refer to the information shown on https://launchpad.net/debian -
which says squeeze is the development focus. However, all new uploads
go into /sid/, and squeeze (and future release series) are filtered
down from sid.

We have a significant issue with the package importer and new releases
- all 16K branches need to be setup, and they need to be setup so that
they stack in a sensible manner.

The stacking logic we have works great for most projects; they have a
trunk; the trunk is where all new work goes *before* it does to other
well known branches, and any new releases can efficiently stack on
trunk. This forms a hub and spoke graph, with the release branches the
spokes and trunk the hub. Most operations open 2 branches, many open
just 1, and space is used efficiently.

For distro releases (and lets focus on Debian ones for now), this
works poorly: we change the development series every release; this
results in a a series of moving hubs - first release 1 is the hub,
then 2 becomes the hub (and its stacked on 1, because when creating
the branch for 2 it stacks on 1, and so forth. After a few releases,
most operations will open 4 branches, and disk utilisation will be
poor because only a little content is compressed in each hub.

Are there any booby traps in the system that would blow up if we made
'sid' the development release, with squeeze etc forks off from it.
This seems to represent what we do in debian better *anyway*: sid and
squeeze are different branches, even if squeeze branches only have a
strict prefix of the sid history.

-Rob