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 in debian/changelog:

  Changes (compared to the version in the archive) present, package not ready for upload.

• unstable in debian/changelog, no corresponding git tag:

  Changes (compared to the version in the archive) present, package ready for upload.

• unstable in debian/changelog, corresponding tag present

  Repository 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 https://salsa.debian.org/haskell-team/pkg-haskell-tools (Git repository: git@salsa.debian.org:haskell-team/pkg-haskell-tools.git, or 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 the haskell-foo/ directory. You can also run this command after you increased the version number in debian/changelog, and it will clean out haskell-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