Boson in pkg-games svn

[Joey Hess]

Reinhard Tartler wrote:
> As first action, I imported boson (actually 3 packages: boson-base,
> boson-music, boson-data), which has been orphaned for some time now. I'm
> incorporating an NMU (from myself), so this package is basically the
> state of whats currently in ubuntu. If you have some time, please have a
> look at it and give me some feedback:
> 
> http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/pkg-games

So, there are two basic layouts that can be used in a multi-package svn
repository, it can either look like this:

trunk/
	boson-base
	boson-data
	boson-music
	...
branches/
	boson-base
	boson-data
	boson-music
	...
tags/
	boson-base
	boson-data
	boson-music
	...

Or like this:

boson-base/
	trunk
	tags
	branches
bosun-data/
	trunk
	tags
	branches
bosun-music/
	trunk
	tags
	branches
...

You're using the latter layout. This layout is well suited to subversion
repositories consiting of several packages that are mostly checked out
one at a time. For example, if you want to work on all of bosun with
this layout you need to check out three separate trees for the three
packages that comprise it.

The first layout above is better suited to subversion repositories for
projects where you want to be able to check out all the packages at
once, since it allows checking out trunk/ and getting all the packages.
Of course it also allows per-package checkouts (trunk/bosun-base). If
the repository gets really large or has some huge packages in it then
checking out all of trunk will become impractical, although moving
things into subdirectories (trunk/bosun/ for example, or
trunk/tetri/foo or trunk/x11/foo or whatever) can help deal with that.

There are some impacts on how things are maintained depending on which
layout is chosen. For example the debian perl team uses the second
layout, and when I was considering joining that team, I asked "how do
you check everything out" and there was no good answer. If I were
interested in doing some work on the games in our repository that cut
across many games, rather than focusing on one or two, then the former
layout would make it easier for me to check everything out. 

So I think that the first layout lends itself more to a style of
maintenance where many people might take up tasks that arn't just
related to package maintenance, but things like adding man pages to all
the games, or the like, while the second layout subtly discourages that
and encourages people to pick and choose the games they have checked out
and work on.

I think it's a good idea to keep that in mind when setting up a
subversion repository. Even though svn does make it easy to move things
around to the other layout later, setting the tone for how packages are
comaintained by the group is something that happens at the beginning and
might not be as easy to change.

-- 
see shy jo
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