Re: Trying to understand patch management - in combination with version control

[Sune Vuorela <nospam@vuorela.dk>]

On 2008-09-02, Andreas Schildbach <andreas@schildbach.de> wrote:
> Now, when I (or a co-maintainer) check out the project from SVN, I get
> (as expected) a nearly empty project directory, containing just the
> debian directory. But, how am I supposed to actually create the patches
> that go into debian/patches? My current understanding is: I
> modify/delete/create a set of files and use something like
> interdiff/debdiff to extract the changeset. But in the case of
> mergeWithUpstream-mode there is no file to modify... Don't tell me I
> have to write patches "by hand" (-:
>
> Also, can you point me to a document that explains workflow with a patch
> management system in general, preferably in combination with a version
> control system.

I'm using svn - and part of the kde/qt team.
Only debian-dir is kept in svn.
Packages uses quilt
Upstream releases tar.bz2 files.
Goal: refresh patches and add a note to the upstream README file

My basic workflow is as follows:
bunzip2 kdeutils-4.1.1.tar.bz2
gzip --best kdeutils-4.1.1.tar
mv kdeutils-4.1.1.tar.gz kdeutils_4.1.1.orig.tar.gz
tar xzf kdeutils_4.1.1.orig.tar.gz
cd kdeutils-4.1.1
cp -a ~/svn/pkg-kde/branches/kde4/packages/kdeutils/debian .
#do changelog
#refresh patches
while quilt push ; do quilt refresh ; done
quilt new 05_README_changes.diff
quilt edit README
quilt refresh
dpkg-buildpackage

#profit


and that's (if existing patches works as is) the full list of steps to
update to new upstream and do a debian specific change.

/Sune