[Gnu-arch-users] Re: ANN: tla-buildpackage

[John Goerzen]

Andrew Suffield <address@hidden> writes:

>> I today uploaded tla-buildpackage to unstable (it should show up
>> shortly).  Its features are:
>
> Does this do anything which arch-buildpackage, tla, and tla-load-dirs
> don't already do between them? Aside from importing a .dsc (which
> would take about half a dozen lines of shell), I can't see anything here.

It does, in fact, use tla_load_dirs internally (and depends on it).

That's not to say that what tla-buildpackage does is not possible
without the package; of course it is.  tla-buildpackage makes it far
easier.  One could, of course, maintain a directory tree containing
Arch-format patch files by hand.  It's a lot easier to use tla to do
this task for you, though.

It automates many tasks that would otherwise be cumbersome and
error-prone.  When importing a .dsc, it takes care to do things the
"tla way" using tla_load_dirs and merging between branches.  It's even
possible to handle conflicts in an automated way in this case, and it
does so.  When importing an upstream source, it handles two different
ways of taring it up, and can also import directly from a directory.

Log messages are automatically generated where sensible.  Changes are
automatically committed where sensible.

tla-buildpackage will fetch the upstream sources from the tla archive
and build an orig.tar.gz for you if necessary.

All the programs keep configs for each Debian and upstream version
up-to-date.

tla-buildpackage also is licensed under the GPL and packaged up for
Debian.  It has detailed usage instructions (more even than
cvs-buildpackage).  arch-buildpackage has none of these.

All the programs do a lot of error-checking -- making sure that you
import original sources in the proper order, using directory names
that are standard in Debian, etc.  Yes, one *could* write a basic .dsc
import program in a dozen lines of shell.  That would not be a *good*
import program, though.

My goal is not to write a little kludgey, error-prone utility.
Rather, I want something that people will find useful on a daily
basis.

Besides, why did anybody write emacs with vi already existed?  Having
two programs available is not a Bad Thing, especially when they are
different in such a significant way as arch-buildpackage and
tla-buildpackage are.

I am already using it for my own development, and it has helped
increase the quality of packages I produce.

-- John