How to cope with patches sanely

[Russ Allbery]

Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam at benfinney.id.au> writes:
> Manoj Srivastava <srivasta at debian.org> writes:

>>         But there is no such linearization, not in the way that
>>  quilt et al do it. The state of such integration is not maintained
>>  in the feature branches; it is in the history of the integration
>>  branch.

> Is this (the integration branch and its history of changes) not the
> linear sequence of changes that David Nusinow is asking for?

Yes, but you don't, in the general case, completely develop some feature
on a branch and then merge it only once.  You do some work on one branch,
merge it, do some work on another branch, merge it, do more work on the
first branch and merge it again, import a new upstream and merge it into
all of your branches, do some more work on the feature and merge it
again....

I can see Manoj's point.  It's not at all clear to me that there's a
useful linearization of the feature branches after that sort of workflow
has continued for a while.

(I'm now maintaining two of my packages using only Git and feature
branches without any patch system so that I can get some practical
experience with this and understand the workflow better.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>