[ELGIS] Heads up: plan to move spec/sources files to git

[Mathieu Baudier]

Hello,

usage of git vs. subversion for maintaining the source/spec files has
already been discussed on this list.
I have tested quite a few approaches and also mock integration with
source control, and here is a proposal on how to change the way we are
managing the files used to build the ELGIS packages.

Currently we have a centralized SVN repository
(https://projects.argeo.org/elgis/svn/factory), whose branches have
the following structure with regard to spec files:

rpmbuild
  elgis
    mypackage
      SOURCES
        patch.spec
        icon.png
      SPECS
        mypackage.spec
    myotherpackage
      SOURCES
      SPECS
  elgis-plus
      ...

My idea is to switch to exactly the same approach as Fedora/EPEL with
one git repository per package, containing the spec and source files
at its root:

mypackage.git
  mypackage.spec
  patch.spec
  icon.png
myotherpackage.git
  ...

Main benefits:
- directly compatible with mock source management integration
- having the same structure as the Fedora repos, very easy to merge
back and forth with them
- no need to check out everything if you are focusing on just a given package
- easy to maintain your own fork of ELGIS packages (themselves
sometimes slightly forked from Fedora), e.g. if you want to build
against PostgreSQL 9, etc.
- easier collaboration model with the "QA" team (that is... myself)
which merges the spec files and perform the official builds: I will
just have to pull/merge upstream (Fedora) or (your) contributions

Also, I plan to dump the concept of "stable" branch in the SCM (but
not as a yum repository of course!), moving the packages which have
actually been tested in ELGIS Testing directly to Stable, instead of
trying to rebuild them from the stable SCM branch (as we were doing in
EL5, which is too heavy, not really useful and may sometimes introduce
problems).

We won't perform these changes before we have released a new batch of
stable packages for EL5 (milestone 5.7 in Trac) and before I have
finished making sure that we have the same spec files for EL5 and EL6
(another inspiration from Fedora/EPEL).

So this won't happen before one month or two, but I thought that I
could already present you these specifications so that it can be
discussed if needed.

Cheers,

Mathieu