Re: How to maintain packaging files for multiple distributions in the same tree?
On Thu, 01 Feb 2007 14:47:59 +0100, Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de> said:
> Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org> writes:
>> On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 03:07:27PM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
>>> Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org> writes:
>>>
>>> > On Mon, Jan 29, 2007 at 10:20:23AM +0100, Goswin von Brederlow wrote:
>>> >> In Ubuntu you have a parallel version. You split of from the
>>> >> main trunk but you follow parallel to it at a small
>>> >> distance. For every new main version you want a new ubuntu
>>> >> version. Ubuntu versions aren't a branch but rather a filter on
>>> >> top of the main release. The main release changes, the filter
>>> >> remains constant (hopefully).
>>> >
>>> > The meaning of your "filter" analogy above isn't clear to me.
>>> > By "Ubuntu versions" do you mean "releases of Ubuntu" or "Ubuntu
>>> > versions of packages derived from Debian"?
>>> [...] Distribution filter: (with patches going both ways)
>>>
>>> ----+--+------+--+--- Debian
>>> \ \ / \
>>> +--+--+------+- Ubuntu
>>
>> What you have described is a branch, in revision control
>> terminology.
>>
>>> > It is work, yes, but in many cases it is necessary, and we do
>>> > quite a bit of it at present.
>>>
>>> Hopefully the graphic above makes it clear why a branch isn't the
>>> most helpfull construct for it. Unfortunately I know of no RCS
>>> that has something better for this kind of parallel developement.
>>
>> This is a fundamental feature of Bazaar and other modern
>> distributed RCS.
> Except that you always have to manually push or pull the changes
> from one branch to the other (or one repository to the other) and
> they can always result in conflicts. They always need attention to
> keep them in sync.
If there are uncoordinated changes, then there shall be
conflicts -- there is no way to create a system where this is not
the case. I can include mutually exclusive features in different
branches, so even a human pretending to be a revision control system
would have to acknowledge there is a conflict; so there is no way a
software system can do better.
> If you had true parallel revisions then there should be a way to
> edit both "branches" at the same time and check in changes to both
> at the same time.
This is trivial using arch and bazaar-ng, and probably any
other modern distributed version control system. I can make
non-conflicting changes to multiple branches (think typo fixes), and
check them all in all at once.
manoj
--
"Being against torture ought to be sort of a multipartisan thing."
Karl Lehenbauer, as amended by Jeff Daiell, a Libertarian
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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