any better practice in using bzr to maintain debian packaging

On Fri, Feb 23, 2007 at 11:05:01PM -0000, LI Daobing wrote:
> New question #3878 on Bazaar:
> https://answers.beta.launchpad.net/bzr/+ticket/3878
>
> Hello,
>
> I am a debian packager, and I am trying to maintain debian packaging
> with bzr ( I switch from svk). I am asking for some better practice
> about this.
>
> consider the low bandwidth between my computer and the lauchpad, I
> choose only put the debian directory to the version control system,
> and this works well under svk, but I meet trouble when I switch to
> bzr, because I can't checkout the files in-place.

I get an idea of what you mean from the following text, but could you
ellaborate on what "I can't checkout the files in-place" means so we are
sure to be talking about the same thing?

> when I using svk, I download the original package, unpack it and
> checkout the debian directory from svk repos, and edit files in debian
> dir and commit, everything is OK, but this does not work under bzr,
> because bzr contain a .bzr directory and .bzr contain binary files, so
> "DH_ALWAYS_EXCLUDE=.bzr debuild" report error. (svn also works because
> .svn only contain text file). bzr-builddeb also does not work, because
> he need a pure bzr branch.

I have a similar setup for building my debian packages, bzr-builddeb
can work in this mode if you supply --merge. You'll need to have the
orig tarball available in ../tarballs (or supply a different location or
bzr branch to get it from)

For the .bzr problem, I've configured debuild to be invoked with -i.bzr
which usually works fine for me. The only problem I've ran into was on
the Debian bzr package itself where it ignored too much, so then it
became `debuild -i /.bzr` which solved all my problems.

>
> following[1] is my currently way (use chmsee as example). It's very
> complex because I can't edit the files in place, any suggestion?
> thanks.
>
> [1]
> 1. bzr branch sftp://<email address hidden>/%7Elidaobing/chmsee/debian/ chmsee-debian
> 2. cp ~/soft/chmsee-1.0.0-beta.tar.gz .
> 3. ln -s chmsee-1.0.0-beta.tar.gz chmsee_1.0.0~beta.orig.tar.gz
> 4. tar xzvf chmsee-1.0.0-beta.tar.gz
> 5. cd chmsee-1.0.0-beta
> 6. bzr export debian ../chmsee-debian/
> 7. debuild

So step 6 and 7 would become `bzr bd --merge` if all is well.

> then if I want to modify the debian-package-information, I must edit
> the file in ../chmsee-debian first, then re-export. after every thing
> is ready, push the chmsee-debian directory to the lauchpad.net.

Wouter van Heyst