svn or arch

[Colin Walters]

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.