Time To Move Orphaned Debian Packages To Git
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
There are several packages in Debian without a associated git repository with the packaging history. This is unfortunate and it would be nice if more of these would do so. Quote a lot of these are without a maintainer, ie listed as maintained by the 'Debian QA Group' place holder. In fact, 438 packages have this property according to UDD (SELECT source FROM sources WHERE release = 'sid' AND (vcs_url ilike '%anonscm.debian.org%' OR vcs_browser ilike '%anonscm.debian.org%' or vcs_url IS NULL OR vcs_browser IS NULL) AND maintainer ilike '%packages@qa.debian.org%';). Such packages can be updated without much coordination by any Debian developer, as they are considered orphaned.
To try to improve the situation and reduce the number of packages without associated git repository, I started a few days ago to search out candiates and provide them with a git repository under the 'debian' collaborative Salsa project. I started with the packages pointing to obsolete Alioth git repositories, and am now working my way across the ones completely without git references. In addition to updating the Vcs-* debian/control fields, I try to update Standards-Version, debhelper compat level, simplify d/rules, switch to Rules-Requires-Root: no and fix lintian issues reported. I only implement those that are trivial to fix, to avoid spending too much time on each orphaned package. So far my experience is that it take aproximately 20 minutes to convert a package without any git references, and a lot more for packages with existing git repositories incompatible with git-buildpackages.
So far I have converted 10 packages, and I will keep going until I run out of steam. As should be clear from the numbers, there is enough packages remaining for more people to do the same without stepping on each others toes. I find it useful to start by searching for a git repo already on salsa, as I find that some times a git repo has already been created, but no new version is uploaded to Debian yet. In those cases I start with the existing git repository. I convert to the git-buildpackage+pristine-tar workflow, and ensure a debian/gbp.conf file with "pristine-tar=True" is added early, to avoid uploading a orig.tar.gz with the wrong checksum by mistake. Did that three times in the begin[ning] before I remembered my mistake.
So, if you are a Debian Developer and got some spare time, perhaps considering migrating some orphaned packages to git?
Is anyone interested? Is the a useful way to support a distro that is within your capabilities? It must apply to other distros too. What about the one that you use?
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