output from the vcs-pkg BoF @DebConf9

[Guido Günther]

Hi Stéphane,
On Wed, Aug 05, 2009 at 07:31:13PM +0200, Stéphane Glondu wrote:
> Guido Günther a écrit :
> > Looks pretty similar to what I do except that you use upstream while I
> > use the debian branch as the base.
> 
> This is done on purpose ;-)
thought so ;) this wasn't ment as criticism, i'm just interested in
finding out the reason for the differences to learn from it.

> Actually, my (and Mehdi's) workflow is largely inspired on yours, the
> only thing I changed is basing the patch-queue branch on upstream (and
> not pushing it to the central repository).
> 
> I find basing the patch-queue branch on the upstream one more convenient
> because it's much easier to reference the branching point. In this
> regard, basing patch-queue on master doesn't really make sense to me
> and/or leads to too much "useless" rebasing (at least with the way I work).
You'll have to rebase against the Debian branch if you did changes on it
but that's cheap. Finding the branching point can be done by looking at
the ancestors of the merge commit (if one needs to identify it).

> > I do that so I can have different
> > patch-queues for different debian releases like:
> > 
> > patch-queue/master
> > patch-queue/lenny
> > patch-queue/bpo-lenny
> > patch-queue/experimental
> 
> I don't really see the benefit of keeping patch-queue branches around,
> and I even think they are troublesome. Having each queue serialized in
> its branch's debian/patches is enough, isn't it?
They don't have to be kept around. Whole point is that recreating the
patch-queue branch (for e.g. backports or point releases) works out of
the box. If I understand things correctly in your workflow you'd have to
identify the tag or branch of the "old" upstream version first and pass
that on to dom-apply-patches? (This could as well be automated of course
by looking at the "right" tag).

> 
> > The branch point for the patch-queue branch would then always be the tip
> > of the corresponding debian branch, like:
> > 
> > git branch patch-queue/lenny lenny
> > git quilt-import debian/patches/series
> 
> IMHO, this is really not convenient.
What does the "not convenient" refer to? 
Cheers,
 -- Guido