Re: [TopGit] Multiple concurrent sets of patches

From: martin f krafft <madduck@madduck.net>
Date: Mar 4, 2009, 07:16 UTC
Message-ID: <20090304071617.GA23605@piper.oerlikon.madduck.net>
In-Reply-To: <20090303192221.GV12820@jones.dk>

also sprach Jonas Smedegaard <dr@jones.dk> [2009.03.03.2022 +0100]:

> I know that I can create all those TopGit branches one by one, but
> I would then need to explicitly declare a list of TopGit branches
> to apply each time I want to (re)generate a quilt patchlist.

There are two ways to achieve what you want with TopGit. Uwe outlined one way:

- create a new branch depending on all the patch branches you want
  to use. This is what I advocated for packaging in Debian's topgit
  0.3-1 package:
  http://git.debian.org/?p=collab-maint/topgit.git;a=blob;f=debian/README.source;hb=debian/topgit-0.3-1

- declare the list of patches to use, as you suggest. This is what
  the current tg2quilt.mk approach of Debian's topgit 0.5-1 package
  does.

In the context where you have a single debian/rules file to prepare a quilt series as part of building your package, I think the latter makes more sense, as it keeps information in debian/rules and alleviates the user of repetetive steps.

However, in the special context of a security fix, the suggestion illustrated by Uwe probably makes a lot more sense. One reason for this is because it is not yet possible to use TopGit patch branches of the past, meaning that you can only ever use the tip of each, and that tg-update basically destroys the infrastructure needed to go back in time. By creating a special depending branch for the security fix, however, you are preserving the graph at the time, which is the tag you were alluding to.

This is what I can add to this discussion. I don't think I have actually fully understood the scope of the problem yet.

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