No subject

(need/have to) use it often enough to be familiar with it. On the other
hand, I am much more familiar with plain git and I don't have to think
long when using it, so I am at ease with Guido's approach.

>> Also, your patch history is trivially versioned as the content of
>> debian/patches/ in master.
>=20
> You will be able to work with diffs of diffs. My head spins when
> I have to do that.

Sure. But as I said, that shouldn't happen too often and the complexity
of TopGit doesn't seem worth getting familiar with.

> Let's say you have a patch queue with patches A, B, C, and D (D is
> the top-most, last patch to be applied) them, and you need to make
> a change to B. What exactly do you do?

# you are on you re-created patch-queue branch
git rebase -i A
# mark B for editing and save
# hack, git add the changes
git commit --amend -c HEAD
# use -C if there is no need to change the comment
git rebase --continue
# git will guide you if there are conflicts

> I think TopGit gives you the benefit of working with Git for
> everything, and using quilt only to apply the patches. Git offers
> cherry-picking, can obsolete patches if the resulting content of two
> of them i identical, gives you access to a log, diffs, and much
> more. It allows you to develop a feature, rather than versioning
> a patch.

Indeed, recontructing the history of a patched file might be more
difficult with our approach. On the other hand, in my experience, that
history is generally not too long (one commit + updates at each upstream
release), and I think seeing the history of the patch itself is largely
sufficient for our purpose.

I think our role as Debian (or whatever) packagers is versioning
patches, rather than developing features :-)

> We definitely need to make it easier to use though. This applies
> mostly to the complexity introduced through the various merges. If
> that cannot be simplified, maybe we can find a way to use namespaces
> that don't show up in gitk or similar tools?

Sure. But as I said above, the gain seems too anecdotical most of the
time (in the context of packaging for a distribution) to bother learning
a new tool.


Cheers,

--=20
St=E9phane