How to cope with patches sanely

[Florian Weimer]

* Manoj Srivastava:

>         Now, a lot of what I need is already present.
>  1) the orig.tar.gz represents the upstream branch, exactly.
>  2) the diff.gz + orig.tar.gz represents the integration branch,
>     exactly.
>
>         So the missing thing is the topic branches.
>   3) I propose ./debian/branches/{TopicA,TopicB,TopicC}.diff.gz
>      files. Each diff, applied to the orig.tar.gz , shall recreate for
>      the interested user the corresponding branch in my development.

I like it a lot.  It's somewhat debatable how to deal with divergence
between the sume of topic branches and the integration branch/real
source package contents, but that's something the package maintainers
can be tasked with.  What's particularly charming about this scheme is
that such discrepancies do not impact repeatable builds.