Introductory mail

[Manoj Srivastava]

On Mon, Sep 29 2008, martin f krafft wrote:

> also sprach Manoj Srivastava <srivasta at acm.org> [2008.09.29.1745 +0200]:
>>         I don't really want to add ./debian/patches directory to keep
>>  track of previous patch series;
>
> Well, it is the only truly-accepted, VCS-agnostic way to have
> a patch series in a Debian package, so why not?

        My goal is not to have a patch series in a Debian package. My
 goal is to be able to develop software that is packaged for Debian --
 and I mean develop, not just be a glorified packager for Debian.

        I guess I am balking duplicating the changes made in the
 source -- firstly, as the git level, then in a _different_ git repo in
 the patches directory. I can do it, but this is ugly.

        I will probably not be using any of the 3.0 formats any time
 soon for Debian -- unless I can make topgit wotk with an on-the-fly
 generation of the quilt series (and remove the series in the clean
 command). The git format does not handle submodules, so it is not a
 contender.


>> and I think we should perhaps add a possibility for topgit to
>> generate patch series based on a tag. Then, you tag all topic--
>> branches when releasing, and then would be able to extract the
>> patches corresponding to the tag(s) at any time in the future.

> This is going to get ugly, since for every tag on the build branch,
> you need to create two tags on each topgit branch, denoting the
> begin and end of the feature branch (which is done with
> refs/top-bases/$name and refs/heads/$name (the tip) right now).

        But I can automate this. I already have a tag_release command,
 which can be augmented to add the tags. The aesthetic objection can be
 made to making gitk --all look ugly, and there could be merit in that
 argument. I'll have to see.

> You might be able to determine either of these from the DAG, but
> I somehow doubt it. I'd love to be proven wrong.

        manoj
-- 
Majorities, of course, start with minorities. Robert Moses
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta at acm.org> <http://www.golden-gryphon.com/>  
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