linearising TopGit forests into patch series (was: [ANNOUNCE] TopGit - A different patch queue manager)

Hi Petr and everyone else,

as some of you may know, I am working on http://vcs-pkg.org, and Pierre kindly alerted me to your announcement, which looks very interesting for what we are trying to do.

Assuming a number of interdependent topic branches, does TopGit provide a way for me to linearise/flatten/serialise these branches in a one-patch-per-branch fashion, so that I could turn any TopGit repository into a quilt series? I am only interested in a one-way conversion from TopGit to quilt for now.

The reason for this is quite simply that while it's fabulous to use e.g. Git for managing the source repository from which to build distro packages, the resulting packages will have all distro-specific changes applied or collated into a single diff. This makes it hard for other distributions to grab patches, for upstream to keep on top of what is being distributed, and for bug fixers to separate patches and test only specific ones.

If we could turn a TopGit-managed forest into a quilt series, we could distribute the series with the package and allow those who inspect the source package to use quilt to navigate the patches.

If anyone has any input on the matter, I'd love to hear it.

Thank you,