2014-01-31 Kristian Nielsen <knielsen@knielsen-hq.org>:
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?