Using quilt to store patches

[Russ Allbery]

Stéphane Glondu <steph at glondu.net> writes:

> TopGit seems great if you actually do upstream development without
> being formally upstream (i.e. don't have direct commit access), in
> collaboration with other people. IMHO, this doesn't match the task of
> packaging for a distribution.

The one package that I've converted to TopGit so far is mostly dead
upstream.  (Upstream is active on the mailing list, but doesn't plan on
making further releases except for security releases.)  I don't have
time to take over upstream development, and neither does anyone else
packaging it so far as I can tell, but there are some useful features
and fixes that have been convenient to share between Debian, Red Hat,
and other packages.  Some of them are relatively complex.

The big advantage for TopGit for me in that situation was that it would
let feature development happen on branches with a history but still
export the results as per-feature quilt-style patches that other
distributions could easily pick up.

I'm not sure yet whether I'm going to bother with TopGit for packages
that just require some tweaking for Debian-specific bits, but I have a
few packages where upstream is dead or very quiet where it seems like a
good fit.  (rssh, tf5, and xfonts-jmk.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>