Use of changeset emails

[Drew Parsons]

On Tue, 2009-11-24 at 13:44 +0100, Manuel Prinz wrote:
> Hi Drew and others,
> 
> my inbox was flooded by changes to the Gerris Flow Solver package, which
> I think was due to merging an upstream branch from upstreams VCS. I'm
> sure that it was not intended but I'd like to remind everyone to keep in
> mind that there may be a lot of changes when upgrading new version, and
> not all are worth a notice.
> 
> Maybe we should find a way to enable only notifications on specific
> branches or something alike. I see the commits list as a chance to
> review changes in the packaging before they get uploaded, so only
> changes to the files in debian/ are interesting for me. Others may have
> different views, so I'd be happy to hear your input to that.
> 
> Please don't feel blamed, it just happened and is no big deal. But I
> think we should ensure that it does not happen too often, so the commits
> lists stays useable.

Hi Manuel,

I've structured the gerris git repository in a manner which follows the
practice of the X Strike Force with the Xorg packages. This structure
suggests a solution to the problem you're reporting.

So, I've set the repo up with two branches: debian-unstable is the main
default branch (i.e. "master" renamed) and corresponds to what I
actually build and upload. It's formed from the upstream source with the
debian subdir added.  

The other branch is the upstream branch itself, I presume it's the one
which gave you the flood of commit messages.  It could in a sense be
dropped altogether, but it's potentially handy to have around.  Actually
for gerris I do actually need[=want] it since there are some DFSG
non-free parts which need to be removed from the upstream tarball.

As you say, an easy way to address your complaint is to have commit
messages coming only from the debian-unstable branch, with the upstream
branch being skipped over.  I presume this is easy to do but I don't
have the exact git magic at hand to get it done, can anyone help here?

Drew