[Pkg-fonts-devel] Initiating the switch to git for packages maintained in SVN

[Rogério Theodoro de Brito]

Hi again.

On Sat, Apr 13, 2013 at 2:04 AM, Christian PERRIER <bubulle at debian.org> wrote:
> The conversion can be done on alioth, I think.

Yes, it can, depending on how much space you have on alioth.

> I do it on my build machine, then I just have to scp the final result
> to alioth....but I'm lucky enough to not be short on bandwidth as you
> can guess.

A long time ago I tried to checkout the pkg-fonts SVN repo as a single
git repository and it took me about 24h and consumed a lot of space,
but the tools now are much faster (I guess that the svnrdump tool can
be super handy, but it generates huge files).

> While doing that, I also make a few changes to packages: see recent
> history in fonts-arabeyes:
>   * Update Standards to 3.9.4 (checked)
>   * Bump debhelper compatibility to 9
>   * Drop ttf-arabeyes transitional package
>   * Add "Multi-Arch: foreign" field
>   * Use "Breaks" instead of "Conflicts". Drop "Provides" as it is no
>     longer needed (installations should have transitioned since wheezy
>     and the package has anyway no reverse dependency.
>   * Use xz extreme compression for deb packages
>   * Use git for packaging: adapt Vcs-* fields

What about creating a script (bash, perl, sed, python, whatever) for
these trivial changes? Even if the tool can only do, say, 50% of the
job, I guess that the fonts team would scale more than the simple
approach that we are using.

Some of the tasks are very "mechanizeable", like, say, doing:

    echo 9 > debian/compat
    perl -i.bak -pe 's/^Standards-Version:
3\.9\.\d+$/Standards-Version: 3.9.4/;' debian/control

And similar things for other stuff. You can even commit the changes
after each step of the script...

Regards.