GIT development branches for packagers?

[Andrew Lutomirski]

On Tue, Jan 14, 2014 at 12:59 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2014-01-14 at 12:41 -0800, Andrew Lutomirski wrote:
>> I have some trivial cleanups I want to make to a package a maintain.
>> These cleanups are trivial enough that I don't think they're worth a
>> new build.  Should I commit them to the master branch?  If so, I can
>> imagine a couple of issues:
>>
>>  - A provenpackager could kick off a rebuild for whatever reason (e.g.
>> dependency soname bump).  That will (I think) inadvertently include my
>> changes.
>
> Yes, this will happen. Why do you think it's a problem, though? If your
> changes are correct but you just don't think it's worth doing a new
> build simply for them, why is it a problem if they get pulled in when
> someone does another build for some *other* (presumably appropriate)
> reason? It would seem like that's just what you'd want to happen.

Depends how well I've tested.  I'd like to imagine that I never commit
anything broken anywhere, but this is empirically incorrect -- I break
development branches on a semi-regular basis.  I guess I'll just have
to be more cautious w/ Fedora :)

>
>>  - I need to think about whether to add a changelog entry or not.  If
>> not, those changes might be included silently.  If yes, then I need to
>> think about what to do about the revision number.
>
> One thing I've seen done is to add the line that actually describes the
> change, above the last date/builder/NEVR line, *without* adding a new
> line identifying the new build, date and builder. That way when someone
> comes along and does a new build, they ought to see what should happen -
> they should roll your partial entry into the entry they add for the
> build.

That would work.

--Andy