On: Canonical Ltd source code repositories have been c...

[giancarlostoro]

Are these not just mirrors though or do they actually use git? Woulda thought they used SVN primarily since they pull from Debian? Or do they just pull tarbals... And this all leads to me wondering how they do their process... Anybody got good docs on how Ubuntu or similar distros that base off a parent distro do their work?

[kevinoid → giancarlostoro]

First, I would like to challenge the assumption that Debian primarily uses SVN for packaging. We can get a rough idea from the use of Vcs-$name package metadata in the testing distribution:

  </var/lib/apt/lists/*_debian_dists_testing_main_source_Sources.lz4 unlz4 |
    sed -n '/^Vcs-Browser:/n;s/^Vcs-\([A-Za-z]*\): .*/\1/p' |
    sort |
    uniq -c

On my system this gives:

      4 Arch
     72 Bzr
      5 Cvs
      5 Darcs
  24168 Git
     21 Hg
     21 Mtn
    603 Svn

Which shows that git is the overwhelming favorite and about 40 times more popular than SVN for packages which provide VCS metadata.

The sources can be pulled directly from Debian as tarballs using [syncpackage]. Ubuntu maintainers are free to use their preferred VCS for maintaining Ubuntu-specific packaging. Using the same VCS as the Debian maintainer (or upstream developer) is often convenient, but not required.

[syncpackage]: https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/syncpackag...

[jobigoud → kevinoid]

Surprised to see the same number for Monotone than for Mercurial.

[rincebrain → giancarlostoro]

Debian stores packaging in Git too, these days, sometimes exclusively.

[hlieberman → rincebrain]

That’s true, but somewhat misleading. Though most Debian maintainers use a VCS for packaging, it’s incidental to what actually ends up in the Debian package tree. That’s all still based off of tarballs submitted off of a developer’s machine.

[infinity0 → hlieberman]

Much less misleading than the previous post.

> Woulda thought they used SVN primarily since they pull from Debian