exporting patches like bitkeeper (was: Introductory mail)

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Sam Liddicott <sam at liddicott.com> [2008.11.19.1533 +0100]:
> A set of patches between the source tar and the target released is
> automatically generated, coping with merging and branching by
> selecting the paths that have the most number of commits - as was
> done for the bitkeeper exports.

Would you elaborate on this a bit? How do you lay out your branches,
how do you or does it select the commits/branches to turn into
patches, how does it flatten them into a linear series of files, and
how does it integrate them with the SRPM?

> All in all it produces srpms's and spec files full of patches just like
> the old redhat kernel rpm's.

So you have dozens of patches? Is each patch useful by itself? Let's
say you have a couple of fixes against upstream, and two new
features you developed on top of upstream, how does someone else
extract e.g. the first of the two features for their own use?

-- 
 .''`.   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
 
"those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love:
 it is the faithless who know love's tragedies."
                                                        -- oscar wilde
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