svn-buildpackage, debian/ only and dpatch-edit-patch

I guess, we (the debichem developers) are not the only people doing some collaborative package maintenance using a SVN-server (just look at svn.debian.org) and svn-buildpackage. To avoid duplication of source code we decided to only keep the Debian packaging files under version control (this also leads to less checkout traffic).

This layout has a problem. You cannot directly create patches, because the SVN of course misses the source code of the package. Fortunately, there is a solution for dpatch users. The dpatch-edit-patch utility provides a switch to handle the above described design: the -b switch. Now all we have to do is, to tell dpatch, where to find the .orig.tar.gz tarball. There is another utility used for this task: dpatch-get-origtargz. This small tool does the following:

1. check if the tarball can be found in the location given by the DPEP_GETORIGTARGZ environment variable or the conf_getorigtargz option (${HOME}/.dpatch.conf)
2. try to get the tarball from the Debian archive
3. try to get the tarball using debian/watch

I don't want to speak about the possibilities 2 and 3. Interesting is the possibility 1. In my case, I have the SVN directories under /usr/local/src/packages/pkg-${PACKAGE} and the tarballs under /usr/local/src/packages/${PACKAGE}. So I tell dpatch the following via ${HOME}/.dpatch.conf:

PACKAGENAME="$(dpkg-parsechangelog | \
        sed -n '/^Source:/{s/^Source:[[:space:]]\+\(.*\)/\1/;p;q}’)”
UPSTREAMVERSION=”$(dpkg-parsechangelog | \
        sed -n ‘/^Version:/{s/^Version:[[:space:]]\+\([0-9]\+:\)\?\([^-]\+\).*/\2/;p;q}’)”

conf_origtargzpath=”/usr/local/src/packages/${PACKAGENAME}”

Now some of you might use different locations of the .orig.tar.gz tarballs. I've created another example dpatch.conf to satisfy such needs. Just adjust the if...else construct to adjust the following ${HOME}/.dpatch.conf for your needs:

PACKAGENAME="$(dpkg-parsechangelog | \
        sed -n '/^Source:/{s/^Source:[[:space:]]\+\(.*\)/\1/;p;q}’)”
UPSTREAMVERSION=”$(dpkg-parsechangelog | \
        sed -n ‘/^Version:/{s/^Version:[[:space:]]\+\([0-9]\+:\)\?\([^-]\+\).*/\2/;p;q}’)”

if [[ `pwd` =~ '^.*/debian-med/trunk/packages/.*$' ]]
then
        conf_origtargzpath=”/usr/local/src/packages/debian-med/trunk/packages/${PACKAGENAME}”
else
        conf_origtargzpath=”/usr/local/src/packages/${PACKAGENAME}”
fi

What about quilt-users? Well, I did not yet use it, so I cannot tell you, what to do here. But I'm sure, there is some way to realize the same behaviour.

Update

The tool svn-do can be used to create quilt patches.