Re: Maintaining two branches.

From: Dirk Süsserott <newsletter@dirk.my1.cc>
Date: Jun 3, 2008, 18:41 UTC
Message-ID: <48459069.7090404@dirk.my1.cc>
In-Reply-To: <20080603181731.GB11735@old.davidb.org>

David Brown schrieb:

Show 22 quoted lines

> On Tue, Jun 03, 2008 at 08:08:09PM +0200, Pieter de Bie wrote:
>
>> You might do the same workflow that Git has with stable / master / next
>>
>> If there is a new upstream release, merge it into external. If you 
>> have patches you want to show to the outside, apply those patches to 
>> external. Then you can merge external into local. The trick is to 
>> never merge local into external.
>>
>> By going only one way (upstream --> external --> local), you'll never 
>> have to worry about having to separate the different patches. Your 
>> history will be displayed much nicer too.
>
> I guess I didn't explain our dilema very well.  We _have_ to separate the
> different patches, for legal reasons.  Perhaps 'external' isn't a good 
> name
> for the branch, maybe it should be 'other'.  Basically, the 'upstream'
> branch is the real upstream tree.  The 'external' or 'other' branch
> contains patches from outside our company.  We are forbidden from
> redistributing these changes, and will be having our customers get them
> from the same source that we do.  Then our 'local' branch is where we do
> our development.

For my understanding: does your 'other' branch contain only a 3rd party library that you (or the 3rd party people) did patch for your purpose and you're not allowed to distribute that patched 3rd party lib? What about using a git submodule for the 3rd party thing. The submodule contains the patched library (for your development) and the customer is then told to supply the genuine library (from the internet) and then apply your patches to it. Would that help you? Probably I missed some legal issues here...

     -- Dirk