On Sun, 2004-12-19 at 23:49 -0500, Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
That's an idea that I've been playing with myself.
You also have a build system?
However, I want to
be able to generate SRPMS from it too, preferably generating the PatchN
series of patches. Problem is that with PatchN you have an ordering for
the patches, whereas with the direct branching from the upstream source
you don't. And I don't quite see how a new branch for interdependent branches
would work in practice.
You'd do something like this in the spec file:
Branch: 64bitfixes
RefBranch: iconcache
RefBranch: pixbufext
Branch: iconpixbuf (iconcache, pixbufext)
So 64bitfixes here is a normal branch that is merged, and doesn't
conflict with anything else. iconcache and pixbufext are branches that
conflict. So you create a new branch iconpixbuf that merges from both
of those. The merging would be manual, instead of automatic as for
normal Branch:. RefBranch just notes in the spec file that this is an
active branch, but it isn't used directly by the build system at all.
However, I think we can avoid all sorts of problems, if instead of
branching
from the source, we branch from the brances -- this would give us the
ordering.
Yes, that's definitely a possibility too. I'm not sure honestly which
would work better in practice until someone actually writes the system
and we start using it for nontrivial packages.