How to cope with patches sanely

[David Nusinow]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 09:37:24AM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:20:49 +0100, martin f krafft <madduck at debian.org> said: 
> > 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. 

If you're applying 10 to 20 different feature branches to your upstream,
then that all comes to the NMU'er as one giant diff. This obviously sucks
and it's what we've been complaining about Ubuntu doing to us for years. We
can do better.

If you want to use your special custom system then that's fine, but I think
that ultimately shipping things as a linear patch stack in the package
makes a lot of sense because you can provide the NMU'er with the ability to
conceptually see the differences in your branches without having to learn
your DVCS. That way you can still use whatever custom system you want to
manage your packages, but at the same time you present your packages to
others in a way that makes it easier for them to work on.

This argument assumes that dpkg-source -x will apply that patch stack
automatically as well, which has been discussed elsewhere.

 - David Nusinow