rethinking patch management with GIT / topgit

[Petr Baudis]

  Hi!

On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 10:18:14PM +0100, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> > Although the above is quite a harsh judgement, I'd like to note, that tg has 
> > had its merrit to promote one right idea: Patches should be managed in the 
> > form of branches by the means of the underlying VCS and not as simple 
> > patchfiles.
> 
> No, distros shouldnt maintain patches at all, instead use their
> own maintenance-branches, which will be rebased to upstream on
> new releases.

  The reason to ponder all this is precisely to _avoid_ rebasing,
which brings many problems - it's PITA to maintain rebasing branches
in a distributed manner, there is no public history record of the
rebases, etc. The alternate solutions try to maintain custom
modifications in a manner that is

  (i) incremental, so that there is full history record of changes and
it is possible to maintain the branch in a distributed manner

  (ii) maitainable, so that at any time it is possible to identify and
isolate each self-contained modification (a.k.a. "patch") of the vanilla
package, for review and upstream submission purposes

  under the presumption that these are desirable properties. With simple
"maintenance-branches" approach, you have to rebase and abandon (i), or
merge repeatedly and give up (ii).

				Petr "Pasky" Baudis