Re: A workflow for local patch maintenance

From: Tony Finch <dot@dotat.at>
Date: Oct 10, 2013, 16:53 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LSU.2.00.1310100927270.3100@hermes-2.csi.cam.ac.uk>
In-Reply-To: <20131010013343.GB14429@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

>
> Do you need to keep the modifications you make on top of upstream as a
> nice, clean series of rebased patches? If not, then you can avoid the
> repeated rebasing, and just use a more traditional topic-branch
> workflow. Treat modifications from upstream as just another topic.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Our aim is to get as many patches into the upstream version as we can, which is why my starting point is a clean rebased patch series. I am also thinking that this will help me to know when a patch can be dropped from the series because upstream have incorporated something like it. If upstream works like git upstream (incorporating patches verbatim after they pass review) then git can handle this automatically, but if the patch gets re-worked it might be easier for me to drop it when rebasing rather than resolve conflicts. I'm also thinking that for packages which we update relatively infrequently, having a clean patch series makes it easier to review whether they are all still necessary when updating. But perhaps I am too wedded to manual patch management...

Tony.

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