Debian packaging with git and conflicts resolution

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Sun, Nov 23, 2008 at 02:25:14PM +0100, martin f krafft wrote:
>   (b) I provide the pristine source and a quilt series in
>       debian/patches, which applies, and thus gives very specific
>       information about how the upstream source gets altered before
>       building the Debian package. The downside of this approach is
>       that upstream (or another distribution) cannot trivially
>       extract patches.

This raises the question of who is the target of the patches shipped
as part of a source package.

I've always implicitly assumed that the targets were our fellow
developers, in case they need to make changes to packages which do not
"belong" to them.  Nowadays stuff like patch-tracking.debian.net (but
I believe other distros have similar services) moves the target toward
upstream authors, and maybe even to final users understanding what is
different wrt pristine upstream.

Now, assuming there is a sane way of storing the information needed to
address both targets, what about providing patches for both targets?
Series of patches for build purposes (i.e., the actual build process
and fellow developers) on one side, and individual / non-series
patches for who wants to apply single patches to pristine upstream.

However, this can open a can of worms, because it implicitly assumes
that single patches are picked from the patch set. If more than one
patches are desired, conflicts between them will be need to be solved
by the picker.

Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..|  .  |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
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