Patch mgmt workflow proposal

[Teemu Ikonen]

On Sat, Jul 30, 2011 at 12:29 PM, Thomas Koch <thomas at koch.ro> wrote:
> Martin F. Krafft (madduck) was so kind to remind me posting this here. We're
> right now at debconf discussing different patch mgmt workflows. Thanks to
> contributions from Joachim Breitner and Guido Günther I've written down an
> appealing (IMHO) patch mgmt workflow:
>
> http://wiki.debian.org/ThomasKoch/GitPackagingWorkflow

Hi,

Are there any packages implementing this scheme (or plans to use it)?

I've been maintaining meshlab (for some value of 'maintain', I've been
somewhat busy with other things lately) with a cherry-pick based git
workflow. Upstream touching commits are made to the debian branch, but
are also cherry-picked to separate patch branches. Patches are
generated by diffing the upstream and patch branches and using
separate dep3 header files ('debian/metapatches').

Interested persons can check meshlab at
http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=debian-science/packages/meshlab.git
and some helper scripts (and very little docs) at
http://gitorious.org/gdp/gdp/trees/master The scripts are probably not
ready for general usage unless you read and understand what they do.

The advantages of this approach are linear history in the debian
branch while also having clean separation of patch commits to topic
branches and the ability to do 'continuous integration' (i.e. builds
testing a single change) during package development without too much
fiddling with git.

On the other hand updating the upstream sources involves merging it to
all the patch branches, and doing some git magic to get the result
transported to the debian branch. The result IMHO has a cleaner
history than topgit using sources.

Best,

Teemu