How to cope with patches sanely

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Manoj Srivastava <srivasta at debian.org> [2008.02.22.1627 +0100]:
>         I am not sure you have understood feature branches.  They are
>  independent, no matter what the overlap. Each feature branch tracks one
>  feature against upstream, no matter how the other features work.
> 
>         The overlap management is done in the integration branch. This
>  is significantly different from a quilt series, as others have already
>  mentioned in this thread,which is a dependent series of
>  linearized patches; and a change in an earlier feature impacts all
>  subsequent patches (and  quilt is good at automating the handling of
>  that impact). [[duplicated so this can be archived on the vcs-package
>  mailing list as well]]

well, I know what feature branches are but I suppose I jumped the
gun. They are independent until you integrate them. But you will
integrate them, thus I tend to think of them as interdependent from
the start.

Anyway, we're not talking about developing with quilt. We are
talking about converting feature branches to quilt patches for the
sake of representation in the source package. I don't see why you
would oppose to that at all, to be honest.

>         Or the patch manager does integration. *Shrug*.  Someone has to
>  do integration sometime.  That is the nature of the beast.  The trick is
>  to do it once, and never have to think about it again.

... except when one feature needs to change and then conflicts with
another feature on re-integration.

>  B) Development happens on the feature branch.
[...]
>     2) Development on one of the branches conflicts with one or more
>        other features. Here, the human has to figure out the difference
>        on the integration branch -- once.

No, every time you do development on the branch. And every time, you
have to remember which branch dependended/conflicted on the feature
branch you're currently working on, or figure it out by trial and
error. I don't consider this efficient. This is work that a computer
should be doing.

-- 
 .''`.   martin f. krafft <madduck at debian.org>
: :'  :  proud Debian developer, author, administrator, and user
`. `'`   http://people.debian.org/~madduck - http://debiansystem.info
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
 
windoze 98: <n.> useless extension to a minor patch release for 32-bit
  extensions and a graphical shell for a 16-bit patch to an 8-bit
  operating system originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor, written
  by a 2-bit company that can't stand for 1 bit of competition.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature (see http://martin-krafft.net/gpg/)
Url : http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/vcs-pkg-discuss/attachments/20080224/f93aa878/attachment.pgp