Debian packaging with git and conflicts resolution

[Manoj Srivastava]

On Thu, Nov 20 2008, Sam Vilain wrote:

> On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 12:56 -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>> >   Manoj, could you detail a particular scenario where you had conflicts
>> > between the topic branches ?
>>         Sure. Back when I was still the sole maintainer of refpolicy, I
>>  had a branch where we had a Debian specific user role called netuser --
>>  this added to the the set of roles upstream policy had created,
>>  (sysadmin, staff, user, ...). This required modifications of files that
>>  touched a lot of places, since a user entity is used in a lot of
>>  security domains (file permissions, ability access other security
>>  domains, etc).
>   [...]
>
> This is all very interesting; I don't think anyone should doubt that
> conflicts arise.  I think this sub-thread started with the desire to
> have a moving merge commit that got re-written.  With git you could

        I have no idea what you just said; so I couldn't possibly have
 been participating in a discussion about that.

> potentially do this; I don't know that there is a normal UI way of doing
> it[1]; it's the sort of thing I normally do using my 'git-amend' script
> (http://utsl.gen.nz/git/git-amend ) which just pops open HEAD in an
> editor and lets you mess with it.  In this way the previous merge commit
> can be removed from the history, which makes it equivalent to the case
> where you re-merged continuously, but you get the merge behaviour you
> desire.

        This seems a worse cure than the illness, in that it is so
 complicated I am not sure I understand it either.

> If I can understand the use case a little better I could possibly
> propose built-in functionality to allow this kind of thing.  Why would
> you want to drop those intermediate merge commits?

        What intermediate merge commits? My current workflow is somewhat
 like §5.4 on the page:
   http://www.golden-gryphon.com/software/misc/packaging.html
 except that I never to the rebase bit until I am ready to submit the
 patch upstream. 

        Does that explain the use case?

        manoj
-- 
The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid
prejudice. Mark Twain
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta at acm.org> <http://www.golden-gryphon.com/>  
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