Experiences with git and pristine-tar

In the last days, I used git very often. It was almost the first time I really used it, but I quickly understand the basic commands.

As some of you may know, the readahead-list package is now maintained in a git repo in the collab-maint project. I decided to use git instead of bzr (which I used for everything before), because of its speed and because I wanted to learn more about git, how it works.

I used git-import-dsc to import the first revision, and used debdiffs from 1 to 2 and from 2 to 3 to import the next revisions. Afterwards, I run git-import-orig on the new upstream tarball, which I downloaded and recompressed. Then, I did the packaging changes, added them using ‘git add changed-file’ and committed them using git commit.

After I had done this, I read Planet Debian and saw Joey Hess’s post about the new features of pristine-tar 0.5, i.e. the integration with git. Running Ubuntu at the moment, I fetched the source package, built it and installed it.

I then opened a shell in my git repo and ran pristine-tar commit path-to-orig upstream/0.20050517.0220 to import the delta for the first tarball. Afterwards I did it for the second tarball.

Because I use git-buildpackage to build the package and Joey said he would like to see support for pristine-tar in git-buildpackage, I then wrote a patch for the programs in git-buildpackage to import and export the orig.tar.gz when needed. The patch can be seen in gitweb, and the maintainer responded in Bug#463580 will integrate the patch with some minor modifications.

Both git and pristine-tar are great works, and it makes it so easy to maintain the readahead-list package. The combination of git, git-buildpackage and pristine-tar is the most powerful I ever used to maintain a Debian package, especially when you are not upstream.