Debian contemplates patch management [LWN.net]

No central VCS for Debian source packages

Posted May 20, 2008 23:20 UTC (Tue) by bignose (subscriber, #40) [Link]

> Apart from Alioth? (Which supports git,svn and hg at least... :O)

First, "supports Subversion, git, Mercurial, Bazaar, etc." is not "central VCS", it's several
disparate VCSes. If Alioth supported only one VCS, it might qualify; but such a choice would
not be popular with those users whose VCS was not the one chosen :-)

Second, Alioth is not for *all* Debian packages, but only those free-software packages that
require collaborative maintenance. The Alioth admins reject requests to use it merely as
storage for a package without a need for ongoing collaborative maintenance.

No central VCS for Debian source packages

Posted May 21, 2008 7:59 UTC (Wed) by pkern (subscriber, #32883) [Link]

> The Alioth admins reject requests to use it merely as storage for a package without a need
for ongoing collaborative maintenance.

Well, things can be kept in ~/public_{hg,git,whatever} and people are also free to use the
collab-maint repositories, which are often used as simple storage of a package's history.

No central VCS for Debian source packages

Posted May 22, 2008 6:16 UTC (Thu) by rhertzog (subscriber, #4671) [Link]

>The Alioth admins reject requests to use it merely as storage for a package without a need
for ongoing collaborative maintenance.

This is wrong. See http://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/PackagingProject for details. You can host
your VCS repository in collab-maint even if you're alone working on your package.

Alioth is clearly the most used resource to host VCS for package management but it's not a
resource that has to be used by everybody. Each maintainer has the liberty to host it
whereever he prefers.

-- Raphael Hertzog, Alioth admin

No central VCS for Debian source packages

Posted May 22, 2008 19:16 UTC (Thu) by bignose (subscriber, #40) [Link]

My understanding of Alioth's policy was based on a rejection notice I received a while ago:

> looking at the description of your project request, it's not clear at all that you need a
full Alioth project to effectively co-maintain your package.

(This rejection was quite justified, IMO.)

From this I understood that Alioth doesn't accept "it's a Debian package" as the sole basis
for hosting a package. It was this that I referred to in my initial comment on the article.

I suppose that, although the above rejection notice doesn't mention Alioth's 'collab-maint'
project, it doesn't exclude the possibility either.

No central VCS for Debian source packages

Posted May 22, 2008 21:58 UTC (Thu) by rhertzog (subscriber, #4671) [Link]

>My understanding of Alioth's policy was based on a rejection notice I received a while ago:

The subject of that rejection is "Please use collab-maint" and the second paragraph says:
"Please check out http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/04/msg... and
http://wiki.debian.org/AliothPackagingProject"

It's that not enough hints to point you to collab-maint, I don't know what we can do. :-)

-- Raphael Hertzog