Re: How to cope with patches sanely

[Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam@benfinney.id.au>]

Andreas Tille <tillea@rki.de> writes:

> IMHO there is a need for putting patches against upstream source
> into a defeult place.

Agreed. This place is provided by a VCS, especially one with good
merging algorithms. We are blessed with an ever-improving wealth of
such VCS software, with superlative merging support. in recent times.

That way, the "patches against upstream source" are revisions in your
debian packaging branch for the source.

> The rationale behind this is that if you are using VCS for your
> packaging to enable effective group maintainance it makes no sense
> to store a complete tarball but just the patches.

I see no rationale for this assertion. Why does it "make no sense" to
keep the source tree in VCS to track changes to it?

> For instance in the Debian-Med project
> 
>    http://svn.debian.org/wsvn/debian-med/trunk/packages/
> 
> we agreed to store only the debian directory into SVN and have a
> get-orig-source target in the debian/rules file.

Subversion is not a VCS with good merging support. That should be
fixed first before declaring it to "make no sense" to track source
changes in a VCS.

NB: IANADD.

-- 
 \       "If you go flying back through time and you see somebody else |
  `\   flying forward into the future, it's probably best to avoid eye |
_o__)                                        contact."  -- Jack Handey |
Ben Finney