maria-developers team mailing list archive

[Otto Kekäläinen <otto@xxxxxxxxx>]

2014-01-31 Kristian Nielsen <knielsen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> Wouldn't it be better to discard the existing debian/ stuff in the upstream
> sources, and work from the native Debian packaging as the base?
>
> The existing stuff has _so_ much legacy and crap, and little of value. It has

Yes, in upstream bzr repo debian/* has a lot of legacy and cruf, but
still it has been updated to some extent by upstream MariaDB and there
are even changes in debian/* between 5.5.32...35, so while packaging
for Debian I still need to consider what upstream debian/* contains
and do rather complex manual merge work that every time needs multiple
build iterations to see that the build result stays the same for the
two different debian/rules etc.

Complexity is an enemy of quality so therefore I suggest that MariaDB
upstream would update the upstream debian/* with the contents from
https://github.com/ottok/mariadb-5.5.

Even though the end result will be simpler and better quality, the
move to it isn't trivial, as we need to consider the upgrade and
install scenarios of current MariaDB.org repository users. It is not a
problem, just work. i'll write about those in another e-mail.

As a first step I suggest that MariaDB would create a new BuildBot
instance 'kvm-deb-trusty-amd64' which builds for every commit it pulls
from https://github.com/ottok/mariadb-5.5.git

This would allow my packaging work benefit from the continuous
integration framework MariaDB has in place and it would generate build
logs anybody can use to verify that the new packaging performs
everything correctly compared to other similar BuildBot runs. Also
MariaDB.org does not have any Ubuntu 14.04 build tests yet, so this
would at the same time provide those too.


And while you are at it, please also consider setting up an instance
'kvm-deb-sid-pbuilder-amd64' that provides a Debian unstable
environment and would run the builds using 'pbuilder', thus giving a
view of how the package actually builds in Debian when submitted to
Debian servers, with proper build dependency installations etc. This
should take as input the MariaDB bzr commits. Initially these builds
will fail, but once the merge of the two debian/* contents have been
done, the build should start showing green. (I have the pbuilder
commands ready and I can submit them to the person setting this up, I
don't know who yet.)


Does this sound like a good plan?