Hi!
I frequently find myself doing manual work comparing if my local git
repository contents and tags are correct and in sync with the git
remotes and the Debian and Ubuntu archives.
I am worried about mistakes such as:
- A maintainer tagged and uploaded but forgot to push it to remote git
repositories
- Maintainer git tagged a version that failed to upload, and then
forgot to delete and re-tag after fix and new upload attempt, or I did
locally fix the tag to point to correct contents put forgot to force
push updated tag to git remotes
- Somebody else than the regular maintainer uploaded but didn't push
to git and git repository content is behind Debian/Ubuntu apt
repositories
- Somebody (e.g. Ubuntu sponsor) modified the package before upload,
and git repository diverges from apt repository
To automatically detect (and perhaps even fix) these situations I
propose git-buildpackage adds a feature 'gbp sync' which would roughly
have this logic:
1. Traverse past 8 or so debian/changelog entries, extract
Debian/Ubuntu release name and version and check if equivalent git
tags exist locally.
2. Compare to remotes and warn if any tags are missing locally, or
remotes have more tags than local, or tags point to different commits.
3. Check from equivalent apt repositories (including -security,
-updates, -proposed-updates) what versions they have and warn if apt
repositories have releases missing from the debian/changelog, or if
past local changelog entries seems to never have reached any apt
repository.
4. While doing the above, also download the . dsc files to a local
temporary directory. Using the checksums in the .dsc files verify that
the apt repository .debian.tar checksum matches what the locally
tagged git commit debian/ contents would produce. This verifies the
uploaded version actually is the same as in the gbp tag.
5. If everything matches, emit a success message. If not, tell users
what is out of sync and ask the user (maintainer) to manually fix and
validate fixes by rerunning 'gbp sync'.
This could also be a separate tool, but since git-buildpackage has
such an extensive test suite and mature code base, and the tool would
operate off the semantics of gbp.conf seems this could be an useful
extension to git-buildpackage.
- Otto