Re: tomcat5.5, 6.0 and version control
Marcus Better wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm working on squashing some ugly bugs in tomcat5.5, and right now I've
> just about had enough with the patch system. I have better things to do
> with my time than regenerating patches and sorting out conflicts for every
> little change. I feel that the complexity of the package has outgrown the
> patch system.
>
> So I'm simply going to make a branch in svn and work in there, with the full
> source tree and no patches. (IMHO that is what version control systems are
> for.) Then I will provide the result for review before uploading.
[...]
Marcus,
Thanks for all your recent work in the Debian Java project. I am
trying to comprehend the approach you seem to be suggesting. Are you
proposing here that you are going to place the Tomcat source under
version control and then make your orig.tar.gz from that? If so, then I
guess you'll be building and uploading the full source, which, if I
understand Debian Policy, will put it in the NEW queue every time an
upload is sponsored. Also, if you indeed plan to work on upstream
source snapshots, how frequently you plan to reintroduce updated source
from upstream and start modifying again for yourself? Are you proposing
to merge your changes made to previous upstream snapshots into the
newly-introduced ones? It seems you are trading the work of a
time-tested, proven packaging method for a far more fragile and
laborious process. If you feel that Tomcat has "outgrown the patch
system", may I suggest taking a look at the xorg or linux-image packages?
>
> Once this is done I would like to look at Tomcat 6, which is in alpha, but
> we could make preliminary packages. However I'd like to have proper version
> control from the start, and preferably a VCS with proper merging support.
[...]
Are you suggesting here that Subversion is not a version control system
with "proper merging support"? If so I'd say that myself and a number
of the other Debian Java project members disagree.
Regards,
--
Barry Hawkins
All Things Computed
site: http://www.alltc.com
weblog: http://www.yepthatsme.com
Registered Linux User #368650
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