recreating historic packages (was: Introductory mail)

[Teemu Ikonen]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2008 at 10:46 PM, martin f krafft <madduck at debian.org> wrote:
> 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.

At the moment, yes, but the new dpkg with version 3.0 quilt format
builds the source package from sources with the patches applied. This
enables one to store the integrated sources in VCS, generate
debian/patches from branches (e.g. with topgit) and build a
debian.tar.gz with simply calling dpkg-source, providing that an
orig.tar.gz is also available.

I agree with Manoj that storing patches inside a diff.gz is somewhat
silly, so my packages do not contain a quilt series yet. If and when
version 3.0 packages can be uploaded to the archive, I'll start
generating a patch series with the method above as well.

Teemu