The Debian Haskell Group packages repository
Rationale
As always, the Debian Haskell Group (DHG) does a few things different than others. Most of our packages are trivial to maintain, so an individual repository for the package would be overkill. On the other hand, it is precisely the orchestration of hundreds of packages that are the distinguishing feature of our work, hence the choice to put all our packaging into one repository.
Also, our work is maintaining the debian/ directory, so we decided to track only that, and not upstream sources. Therefore, the directory structure for a Haskell package foo is as follows:
/p/ -- root of all packaging
/p/haskell-foo/ -- package name (Debian source package name)
/p/haskell-foo/debian/ -- packaging directory
/p/haskell-foo/debian/control -- the usual files
...
In particular, /p/haskell-foo/ contains no files besides debian/. So what is
the point of having the files under the debian/ subdirectory? This way, you can
extract the upstream sources in there and run your usual
uscan/debchange/quilt/sbuild/debrelease-commands as usual. The .gitignore
file is set up so that git will not bother you about the extracted upstream
sources.
As running uscan or dpkg-buildpackage in that directory will dump files into
the parent, we introduced the /p/ directory. Again, a .gitignore
file is set
up so that git will not bother you about the tarballs, deb
-files or
changes
-files therein.
Tagging convention and workflow
Packages are in one of three states:
-
UNRELEASED
indebian/changelog
:Changes (compared to the version in the archive) present, package not ready for upload.
-
unstable
indebian/changelog
, no corresponding git tag:Changes (compared to the version in the archive) present, package ready for upload.
-
unstable
indebian/changelog
, corresponding tag presentRepository matches state in the archive, nothing to do.
Because git cannot tag individual directory, the tagging convention includes the Debian source package name:
<source package name>_v<full debian version>
In the full debian version, :
and ~
are replaced by _
.
Debian Haskell Tools
We provide tools for a number of repeated tasks, such as tagging, upgrading,
knowing what to build and what to upgrade, etc. They are provided in the
pkg-haskell-tools
package, available in sid, or at
git@salsa.debian.org:haskell-team/pkg-haskell-tools.git
(git://salsa.debian.org/haskell-team/pkg-haskell-tools.git for
read-only access).
All tools are under the dht
prefix, and it has a manpage (man dht) or at
file:///usr/share/doc/pkg-haskell-tools/dht.html.
Useful general tools
-
origtargz
:In order to download and extract upstream sources in one go, simply run
origtargz
inside thehaskell-foo/
directory. You can also run this command after you increased the version number indebian/changelog
, and it will clean outhaskell-foo
before. -
git clean -d -x -n
:Save space by removing all extracted upstream files and other untracked files in
/p/
. Replace-n
with-f
after checking that everything is fine