Team Repo Guide

This guide will guide you through cloning team repo, building packages from it and making changes, pushing changes back.

Preparation

If you have SSH access, please setup ~/.ssh/config as per ?Alioth/Git. Optionally generate and upload SSH key to alioth.

Also everyone will need at least these packages:

$ sudo apt-get install git-core git-buildpackage pristine-tar

Cloning the repo

Let's create a directory for all our packaging and change into it:

$ mkdir ~/pkg-crosswire
$ cd ~/pkg-crosswire

Currently we only have a sword package. So we are going to clone, if you have ssh access:

$ git clone ssh://git.debian.org/git/pkg-crosswire/sword.git

and if you don't

$ git clone git://git.debian.org/git/pkg-crosswire/sword.git

Now create a branch to work on

$ git checkout -b whizbang

Commit, commit, commit. You hear there were some commits on the origin/master branch. Here is what you do

$ git checkout master
$ git pull

You inspect what's available. Once you get back to whizbang pull the fetched changes

$ git checkout whizbang
$ git pull . master  # dot means local repo

Once your branch is ready, push for a review (give a sensible branch name eg. updated-manual-pages):

$ git push origin whizbang:updated-manual-pages

And advertise it on the mailing list. Next time anyone runs git fetch or git pull they will receive your branch as origin/updated-manual-pages.

If you don't have ssh access, you can push to github.com or repo.or.cz, both are free git hosting services. Or you can generate patch series and email them:

$ git fetch
$ git format-patch master

This will make 0001-*.patch, 0002-*.patch .... 000X-*.patch which can be easily applied with git am

Building from the git repo

Before you push your whizbang (erhhh I mean update-manual-pages branch ) you should build it and test it. You can easily do it with git-buildpackage.

Let's first peek at all remote branches

$ git branch -r
  origin/HEAD
  origin/master
  origin/pristine-tar
  origin/upstream

origin/upstream holds upstream code and origin/pristine-tar holds small binary deltas. Using these two branches it is possible to regenerate upsteam tarball with identical checksum. You can look at them and see what they store:

$ git checkout origin/pristine-tar
$ ls

You'll get a warning after first command, it's fine that's expected. Anyways let's go back to building the package.

$ git checkout master

First you need to do a small setup of git-buildpackage

$ cp /etc/git-buildpackage/gbp.conf .git/
$ nano .git/gbp.conf

This file is commented and mostly self-explanatory. For now just comment out one line:

#pristine-tar = True
    change to
pristine-tar = True

and save. This tells git-buildpackage that it can use pristine-tar to generate orig.tar.gz. So now if you envoke this:

$ git buildpackage

It should start building master branch in the ../build-area. Sit back, relax and watch it do it's magic. If on the other hand you want to build your whizbang branch you have two options, either run:

$ git buildpackage --git-debian-branch=whizbang

or edit one line in the .git/gbp.conf:

#debian-branch = master
    change to
debian-branch = whizbang

and then run git buildpackage

For more information about git-buildpackage see it's documentation, which is located here /usr/share/doc/git-buildpackage/manual-html/index.html.

If you want to use pbuilder you will need to do this

$ cp /usr/share/doc/git-buildpackage/examples/git-pbuilder ~/bin/
$ chmod +x ~bin/git-pbuilder
$ nano .git/gbp.conf

#builder = debuild -i\.git/ -I.git
    change to
builder = ~/bin/git-pbuilder

This will make git buildpackage use pbuilder.

On a side note any parameters that you pass to git buildpackage which do not start with --git- will be passed to your builder script, so that you can fine tune options per build.

CategoryGit