git branches

[Ferenc Wagner]

(Thread moved off the bug report.)

Sam Hartman <hartmans at debian.org> writes:

> Russ Allbery <rra at debian.org> writes:
>
>> Ferenc Wagner <wferi at niif.hu> writes:
>>
>>> It looks like our squeeze branch misses the merge of
>>> bug/unlink-pidfile.  Nor was upstream/2.3.1+dfsg merged into that
>>> bugfix branch...  As things stand, our master branch has the fix
>>> (e3f9f278) but our debian branch does not, so when I branched
>>> squeeze off it the fix got lost.  I'm a little uncertain how to
>>> untagle this...
>>
>> I think my bright idea of the separate debian branch turns out
>> to be way more confusing than it's worth, so I propose
>> dropping that distinction going forward and merging the debian
>> branch into master, then making Debian-specific changes only
>> in master.  Having separate branches for bug fixes and
>> features that we want to push upstream makes sense, but the
>> distinction between debian and master was never clear and
>> makes it too likely that we'll run into problems like this.
>
> This will save me the trouble of understanding how it worked:-)

And waste my efforts trying to understand it. :)

> Russ is aware of my experiments in doing something similar. I've looked
> at git-dpm and topgit.  Topgit seems too immature.  Git-dpm seems like a
> potentially valuable tool but it requires a lot of knowledge.
> So, there's not really anything I can recommend to replace the
> debian/master distinction.

The question is what this distinction exactly is and whether we want
this distinction at all.  Master was meant to be some kind of
"integration" branch, but I'm rather hazy on that concept.  It seems to
be inadequate as such, because we often have several active HEADs (like
lenny, squueze and sid now, and maybe backport branches some time).

In short, I'm open to getting rid of the debian branch (especially that
its name clashes with a directory) just like to other sensible ideas. :)
The (planned?) source format change may also be relevant here.
-- 
Cheers,
Feri.