I've been using git for a while, like it a lot, and finally decided it's time 
to move all my Debian packaging work over from CVS.  After a frustrating few 
hours trying, I gave up on trying to use git-cvsimport.  It generates mangled 
repositories even for simple packages like sudo.  The 
git-import-dsc tool in the git-buildpackage package works fine as far it goes, 
but I'd really like to preserve my history.  So, after some consultation on 
IRC, I took a look at parsecvs.  It didn't quite work out of the box, either, 
but looks promising, and the 
author showed an immediate interest in the problems I'm having and offered
to help.  So, perhaps I'll be able to use it before long...

In the meantime, a while back I offered to help Gudjon I. Gudjonsson 
restructure the sdcc packages so that a DFSG compliant version can return to
main with a full version under a different package name going in 
non-free.  This is all necessary because some of the assemblers provided 
in the package have a non-commercial use clause in the license, and 
there are also license
issues with the HTML documentation.  I care about this because sdcc is a
build dependency for gnuradio, which I maintain for Debian (it uses the 8051 
toolchain to build downloadable code for the USRP, etc).  While waiting for 
parsecvs to get some love and attention, I sat down this evening to 
restructure sdcc and move it to git.

I'm pretty happy with my progress so far, though there's a bit left to do 
before uploads happen.  Gudjon and I decided to use the 
<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/PackagingProject">collab-maint</a>
facilities on alioth.debian.org for collaboration, which took me a little 
head-scratching to figure out, but looks like a perfect fit for our needs.  I 
updated the wiki page about 
<a href="http://wiki.debian.org/Alioth/Git"> Git on Alioth</a>
with a few of my learnings as I went through the process.

Using git branching to handle non-DFSG-compliant upstream sources is pretty
obvious, the notes in the git-buildpackage documentation helped.  Using 
pristine-tar to capture the deltas required to regenerate orig.tar.gz files
from the git repo is amazingly cool.  It's hard to believe how much friendlier
the world seems when you don't have to drag a bunch of tarballs around with 
you to do useful work!  And git-buildpackage has suitable options to make
using it pretty automatic.  Great stuff!

It's likely to be a few days before I can get back to this, finish up, and 
upload the results of this restructuring work.  In the meantime, I'm writing
this entry largely to offer my compliments to everyone involved in making 
git-buildpackage, alioth, and collab-maint work so well.  Special thanks to 
Joey Hess, whose pristine-tar package is another in a long line of absolutely 
brilliant tools that contribute to making my life easier!  I'm going to end up
using it a lot.

[[!tag tags/debian]]