Re: How to cope with patches sanely
On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 05:10:16PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam@benfinney.id.au> writes:
> > Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> writes:
>
> >> But there is no such linearization, not in the way that
> >> quilt et al do it. The state of such integration is not maintained
> >> in the feature branches; it is in the history of the integration
> >> branch.
>
> > Is this (the integration branch and its history of changes) not the
> > linear sequence of changes that David Nusinow is asking for?
>
> Yes, but you don't, in the general case, completely develop some feature
> on a branch and then merge it only once. You do some work on one branch,
> merge it, do some work on another branch, merge it, do more work on the
> first branch and merge it again, import a new upstream and merge it into
> all of your branches, do some more work on the feature and merge it
> again....
>
> I can see Manoj's point. It's not at all clear to me that there's a
> useful linearization of the feature branches after that sort of workflow
> has continued for a while.
>
> (I'm now maintaining two of my packages using only Git and feature
> branches without any patch system so that I can get some practical
> experience with this and understand the workflow better.)
The problem is that you and Manoj assume that this is the only way to do
things. I don't believe this. Pierre Habouzit has been experimenting with
an alternative method of feature branches that exports to a linear stack of
diffs just fine. Just because Manoj is doing something one way right now
doesn't mean it's the only or even the correct way to do it.
- David Nusinow
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