recreating historic packages (was: Introductory mail)

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Teemu Ikonen <tpikonen at gmail.com> [2008.09.30.1222 +0200]:
> First, find a path from tagged release commit in master to the
> commit in topgit branch patch/x preceding the commit in master
> where patch/x was last merged in. Let's call this commit Px. Next,
> starting from Px, find the commit in top-bases/patch/x preceding
> the last merge of top-bases/patch/x to patch/x and call this
> commit Bx. The patch can then be recreated from diff(Bx, Px) and
> .topmsg at Px.

This will work only if you merge all topic branches into a build or
integration branch to create a massive diff.gz without
debian/patches.

I don't do this. Instead I tg-export the topic branches to a quilt
series and lay that on top of the master (or 'debian') branch when
building the package.

If I wanted to drop the build branch, then I'd tag master at that
point as debian/topgit-0.4-1 and also tg-tag all topic branches as
debian/topgit-0.4-1 as I export them to the quilt series.

With this, at a later point, building 0.4-1 would mean to checkout
debian/topgit-0.4-1 and ask tg-export to export the patch series for
debian/topgit-0.4-1; tg-export would need to learn to be able to
deal with tg-tags and pass them on to tg-patch.

People have suggested a separate branch, just like pristine-tar
uses, but I would think that storing those refs is much better left
for the top-tags/* namespace (which topgit's author has made
available to us for this purpose).

Instead, I think such a branch could be used to store not the refs,
but the debian/patches contents. At which point, my build branch,
which is basically master with debian/patches/* overlayed makes much
more sense to me.

-- 
 .''`.   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
 
sed -e '/^[when][coders]/!d' \
    -e '/^...[discover].$/d' \
    -e '/^..[real].[code]$/!d' \
    /usr/share/dict/words
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