On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 4:29 PM clime clime@fedoraproject.org wrote:
Probably there are more variants but I see these three right now. I think variants 1 and 2 where the spec file is kept in dist-git but patches can be in source-git are more within our reach right now (but I might be wrong, variant 3 is also interesting).
I think the best approach is to try your ideas on many different real Fedora packages from many different upstreams, and refine the tools as you go, documenting what works and what doesn't. Tools like tito and rdopkg have the advantage of having been tested and hardened across many different packages, Fedora releases, and RHEL versions.
In relation to rdopkg, I forgot to mention that Debian's git-buildpackage tool uses a patch management model that is almost identical to rdopkg for RPMs. Debian packagers create "patch-queue" branches from the upstream project, and git-buildpackage can write out a quilt-formatted series of .patch files into the debian packaging. It is pretty fast to manage a large series of downstream patches this way, rebase to new versions, etc.
- Ken