how to generate patches out of $DVCS branches: best practices?

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 01:38:14PM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> I don't split out patches, but all my Debian packages live on
> git.debian.org (except software where I'm the upstream, in which case
> it's on my own git server).  Using gitweb, people can inspect the
> changelog and download diffs of individual changesets.  You can also
> craft URLs for people that will do things such as spit out a diff
> between upstream and debian heads, or between two different Debian releases.

Well, it's all fine and I'm already doing all of this, but this doesn't
really address my problem.

My problem is to cope with people not knowing git at all. I feel they
have the right to understand what changes I applied wrt upstream
(remember the discussions after the OpenSSL security flaw?).

Also, diffs and individual changesets fail to address a problem which is
instead addressed by commented patches. That is, they are missing a
single description for the whole topic branch. You can address this in
git (AFAIK) only by keeping topic branches as single changesets using a
describing commit message, but this requires rebasing which is bad in
published topic branches.

Also, currently in Debian you have tools which help maintainers
describing their patches, e.g. lintian complaining about dpatches not
commented. You loose this benefit if you go for $DVCS branches alone.

Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
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