git workflows for general Ubuntu development

On the server team, we've been working on a process that uses git to do our "Ubuntu merges". As a consequence, we now have a mechanism that can import package histories into git on Launchpad. We think that this work opens up a bunch of new possibilities, such as for drive-by contributors submitting merge proposals entirely through git. We'll be talking about our work tomorrow, as part of the Ubuntu Online Summit. The session page is at http://summit.ubuntu.com/uos-1611/meeting/22710/git-based-merge-workflow/ and is currently scheduled for 2016-11-15 18:00 UTC. Times may change, so be sure to check the schedule tomorrow. I originally wrote about this in August 2014 (https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2014-August/038418.html). We've come on a long way since then. Our automated git imports preserve histories. Where relevant, Ubuntu packages are correctly parented from their Debian origins. We hope to start running this live soon, which will import package uploads into our git trees as they happen rather than on-demand. Once this is live, anyone will be able to easily clone from the "current" Ubuntu packaging git trees, which we think is useful in itself. If you're interested, we'd love your feedback. What are your use cases? What sort of workflows would you like to see? You can see some further notes of ours as they form in the pad on the session page linked above. What have we missed? Note that developer time, as always, is limited. We've developed what we have so far to speed up our own work. Our use cases are probably quite different from non-core contributors. Possibly enabling the drive-by contribution use case is a happy consequence. Volunteers able to work on additional things are welcome to join us. However I am specifically looking for things we can tweak without much effort that will help others. I regret that we don't have the time to take on a big project that doesn't benefit our own use cases. So please understand that if you make a proposal that involves significant developer work, it is unlikely to happen unless you also find developers to volunteer their time to work on it. At the UOS session we'll be able to discuss this in real-time on Google Hangouts and concurrently on IRC. But our time in the session is limited to one hour, so replying to this thread to first distill any conversation would be helpful if possible. Robie Basak Ubuntu Server Team -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 819 bytes Desc: not available URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/attachments/20161114/c42af845/attachment.pgp>