Re: [be] BE and git-- I can't fetch it! (automating packaging)

[Jonathan Marsden]

On 05/13/2011 10:24 PM, Teus Benschop wrote:

> The Debian system is put together by many scripts that automate
> nearly everything one can imagine. I wonder whether they also have
> scripts that automatically package new upstream releases that the
> scripts detect automatically?

If packaging could be fully automated, you wouldn't be needing me to do
anything at all to get new packages made and into Debian and Ubuntu :)

Debian and Ubuntu both have automated systems that automatically detect
new release tarballs becoming available; however, you can't fully
automate packaging a new release.  A new upstream tarball can will often
have new files in it, it may well have patches in it that were in the
packaging before, and so now need removing from the packaging, etc.
Updates to Debian or Ubuntu Policy can also require that conformance to
policy is rechecked before stating that the newly updated package
conforms to the new (current) policy version... this sort of thing is
not automatable.  Humans are not obsolete yet :)

The name change from bibledit to bibledit-gtk broke the watch system:


http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=pkg-crosswire-devel%40lists.alioth.debian.org

does not show the availablility of bibledit-gtk 4.2, because the current
package has a watch file looking for tarballs named bibledit-x.y.tar.gz
and not bibledit-gtk-x.y.tar.gz

That will be fixed once we get some version of bibledit-gtk into Debian,
and after that I'll get notified automatically of new releases of
bibledit-gtk once again by those automated systems.

Jonathan