How to cope with patches sanely

[Manoj Srivastava]

On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:20:49 +0100, martin f krafft <madduck at debian.org> said: 

> also sprach Manoj Srivastava <srivasta at debian.org> [2008.02.20.1722
> +0100]:
>> I have to take care of it manually once.  That is the first time I
>> setup the integration branch that merges in changes from the
>> overlapping feature branches.  This is not a big deal, because the
>> human has to spend some time disambiguating the overlap.
>> 
>> It is critical to me that I never have to spend that time again --
>> and in my case, I never do, since future non overlapping changes
>> (like, say, a new upstream release) produce deltas that apply to the
>> feature and integration branches seamlessly.  I never have to rethink
>> or redo any patches.

> What if feature B depends on feature A

        Interesting.  I have never used feature branches where one
 feature was dependent on another feature; feature branches are usually
 "Pure" features.  I'll probably end up as creating feature branches "A"
 and "A+B".

> and a new upstream causes a merge conflict in feature A. Then you have
> to fix feature A, which causes a conflict with feature B. Now you have
> to redo the entire integration, taking care to merge in the right
> order...

        The latter part is not true; you just pull into the delta the
 change from feature branch "A+B"; you'll still have to  manually
 intervene twice, once in the "A" branch, once in the "A+B" branch, and
 the latter delta goes into the integration branch.

>> > Yes, just like I want to have feature branches instead of one
>> > gigantic debian branch.
>> 
>> I use my CSM to provide me the changeset: baz diff <branch A>
>> <upstream>

> That does not help me during an NMU from the source package.

        For an NMU of one of my source packages, if you can't deal with
 the distributed SCM, then you need not worry about differentiating the
 feature branches, fix the source conflicts, upload. I'll deal with
 fallout.  Comes with the territory. 

        manoj
-- 
Sic Transit Gloria Thursdi.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta at debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>  
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