Request for comment: Potential change to dist-git branch structure

[Jesse Keating]

On 12/04/2010 02:19 AM, Matej Cepl wrote:
> Dne 4.12.2010 06:33, Garrett Holmstrom napsal(a):
>> Why tie branch names down to specific releases?  While that scheme makes 
>> it easy for fedpkg to guess what release to attempt to build against 
>> when one only cares about one release, it makes little sense to call a 
>> branch "f14-rh123456" when in reality that branch will merge into "f13" 
>> as well as "f14".
> 
> +1 Why not just get out of all this silly business and leave branches to
> be whatever we want them to be as God^H^H^HLinus intended them to be?
> Really, branch rhbz1234567 doesn't have to have any relation to any
> particular distribution (we usually don't clone Fedora bugs to all
> distros where they happen, and that's The Right Thing).

Without some sort of naming scheme, it'd be quite hard for the fedpkg
client to fill in proper data for %{?dist} and other such macros when
parsing the spec file.  It'd require manual action on the user to either
define it with a fedpkg option, or to set it in some sort of git config
(which doesn't traverse upstream/downstream so every cloner would have
to do that).

> 
> Related issue I have with the Fedora git repositories is that one cannot
> remove any branch once it is created. After I have created in bitlbee
> repo two topic branches, only to find out that I cannot remove them
> after the merge. I can understand need for documenting development of
> the distribution, but cannot we lock just SOME branches (probably master
> + f* ones)? In this situation, I have moved my topical branches to
> gitorious, where I can do whatever I want to do with them.
> 

That's another reason to have naming schemes so that we can design the
ACL system accordingly.  However I'm reluctant to enable non-ff changes
in shared repos.  Lots of ways for things to go wrong there,
particularly when "official" builds can come from anywhere within the
repo, no current restriction on "builds for dist-f14* must come from a
f14 branch" type thing.  I honestly think we need to enable "forking" of
repos over to a fedorapeople place where you can do whatever you want
with them.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating