Hello! I've ended up in being both the maintainer in Debian and an upstream developer for a couple of packages and I have been fantasizing about how to optimize my workflow so that I primarily fix all bugs and do QA directly on the upstream development version (=upstream git master) and then have only a very small overhead work then importing and uploading new upstream releases in Debian.
Is somebody else already doing something similar like this? Any tips, blogs, examples on the topic? I find it annoying to carry Debian patches for bugs that could be fixed globally at upstream, and it is also annoying when something Debian QA catches is broken at upstream and I find it out only at the time I am preparing an upload to Debian. My goals would be: - have debian/ in upstream repository, and a CI that does the bulk of Debian QA on every upstream commit and immediately gives feedback to upstream devs that "break" something from Debian QA point of view - have the delta of Debian debian/ an upstream debian/ as small as possible - fix all bugs detected in Debian directly at upstream when possible - when not possible, fix them "locally" first in Debian and eventually have it upstreamed - have it easy to compare Debian and upstream debian/ contents - bonus: import upstream releases as git operations without having to export and import tar.gz packages I have in rdiff-backup pretty much this setup already in place but I have some challenges on how to handle the debian/changelog file and a couple of other details. I would be very keen to learn from others before inventing too much of new. - Otto
