Advantages of simpler patch management tools

[martin f krafft]

also sprach Romain Francoise <rfrancoise at debian.org> [2007.10.10.1722 +0100]:
>   a) So far using topic branches for simple fixes was too complex
>   (in Arch).  Now that we have Git it's simpler, but it's still
>   more heavyweight than just putting a patch in debian/patches and
>   be done with it.

I agree with you. Yet, the number of times I had to modify a patch
which would not apply cleanly anymore really made me long for a VCS
with proper merge support to handle this.

>   b) quilt provides a very comfortable interface for
>      creating/refreshing patches, so living with patches isn't too
>      painful.

I never actually tried it, and people like Andrew Morton even use it
for kernel maintenance, so I'll take your word for it.

>   c) Everybody understands debian/patches.  Not everybody groks Git.
>      This makes NMUs and collaboration easier.

While I appreciate Joey's work on git.tar.gz, I also think we should
figure out a way to make it all more accessible. The Canonical/HCT
method of generating debian/patches from VCS is not really among my
favourites; instead I really envision more tool like
dpatch-edit-patch and its quilt equivalent, abstracted to the point
where a patch is a patch independent of its representation: a file
or a feature branch.

> I'll probably blog a response to your post; the gist of it is that
> I find your approach very interesting but probably not worth the
> trouble at the moment.  Once the early adopters such as yourself
> have come up with a streamlined workflow for keeping Debian
> modifications in branches, I'll reconsider.  :-)

Cool. I hope my above responses make the writing more interesting.
:)

-- 
 .''`.   martin f. krafft <madduck at debian.org>
: :'  :  proud Debian developer, author, administrator, and user
`. `'`   http://people.debian.org/~madduck - http://debiansystem.info
  `-  Debian - when you have better things to do than fixing systems
 
"syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon."
                                            -- epigrams in programming
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