How to cope with patches sanely

[Manoj Srivastava]

On Sun, 24 Feb 2008 21:17:10 -0500, David Nusinow <dnusinow at speakeasy.net> said: 

> On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 06:08:17PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> David Nusinow <dnusinow at speakeasy.net> writes:
>> 
>> > The problem is that you and Manoj assume that this is the only way
>> > to do things. I don't believe this. Pierre Habouzit has been
>> > experimenting with an alternative method of feature branches that
>> > exports to a linear stack of diffs just fine. Just because Manoj is
>> > doing something one way right now doesn't mean it's the only or
>> > even the correct way to do it.

        I would be interested in details of this, and whether this
 approach works with pure feature branches where the features are being
 developed contemporaneously with each other an upstream development;
 and thus the branches overlap both temporally and in code space.

>> Well, I definitely don't think it's the only way to do things, and
>> I've been one of the people arguing in favor of quilt and exporting
>> to a set of patches.  :) But the "native" Git workflow that people
>> have previously written up for Debian packages doesn't seem to me to
>> linearize very easily, and IMO one of the points here was to let
>> maintainers keep using their native workflows and use the package
>> format for interchange.  Changing the workflow to allow easier export
>> to a particular package format seems to be going the wrong direction
>> to me.
>> 
>> In other words, I still think a patch-based package format is a good
>> idea and would be very valuable for a lot of what's in Debian, but I
>> have to agree with Manoj's point, based on what I've seen so far,
>> that converting an arbitrary Git or Arch repository for Debian
>> package maintenance to such a package format isn't necessarily easy.

> Ok, that's fair. In the worst case then people who want to use this
> sort of workflow could stick everything in a giant diff like we do
> now, so nothing would be lost.

        Or have dpkg understand not just quilt, but git.

        I mean, if we are making dpkg understand quilt-as-a-version-control
 system, why not also have it grok a modern SCM like git? (I know that
 trying to get it to understand arch is a lost cause).

        Would joeyh's efforts to get dpkg v3 format be a got repo make a
 difference here?

        manoj
-- 
Freedom begins when you tell Mrs. Grundy to go fly a kite.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta at debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>  
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