Debian packaging with git and conflicts resolution

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Nicolas Duboc <nduboc at debian.org> [2008.11.16.1700 +0100]:
> There's one point I didn't really understand and with which I have a
> problem when I tried to switch my jython package to git.

Hm, I really ought to update the article and state that it is aged.
The concepts still hold, but the details have changed, e.g. with the
advent of TopGit.

Furthermore, the question of whether there should be a long-lived
build branch or not is still somewhat up in the air. An alternative
I am toying with is to export a patch series and store that in
a completely separate branch, from where the package is built and
which is tagged. See the archives from September and October for
lively discussions on the topic.

An alternative approach I have yet to look at is one-time branches
off the Debian branch ('master'), into which you merge the feature
applicable to this release. You don't even need branches for that,
you could work on a temporary branch and then simply tag the tip
when the package is uploaded. It'll be an immutable tentacle, but
one which gets recreated for every release. With TopGit in the
background, this could be quite painless.

> But this script will checkout the build branch and try to merge
> the upstream branch in. That should fail due to the same conflicts
> which were resolved in the deb/conffile-location branch. That's
> actually what I experience with my tests.

Yeah, I don't think there is anything you can do in this case, and
it's one reason to avoid a long-living build branch into which you
keep merging.

git-rerere might be helpful. I think in general it would be better
to avoid the situation altogether, simply by not introducing cycles
into the merge trees.

-- 
 .''`.   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
 
"verbing weirds language."
                                                           -- calvin
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