Workflow - Tracking upstream repository with local patches

[Talden]

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 9:22 AM, Alexander Belchenko <bialix at ukr.net> wrote:
> Paul Moore пишет:
>
>
> > I'm trying to work out what the optimal workflow would be with Bazaar
>  > for the following situation:
>  >
>  > I'm tracking an upstream project (which is using svn, not bzr, but
>  > that's not a big deal, I can use bzr-svn) where I only have read
>  > access. I have some local patches of my own, which I am working on,
>  > and which I would ultimately like to provide as a individual patches
>  > to the project.
>  >
>  > I think I need the following - a "clean" branch from upstream, into
>  > which I periodically pull changes, and a local branch for each of my
>  > patches, which I maintain and periodically merge from my upstream
>  > mirror. To submit a patch, I'd bzr diff between my branch and the
>  > upstream mirror, and submit that.
>  >
>  > One issue with this is that my feature branches' history will be
>  > cluttered with regular "merge from upstream" checkins. I can see the
>  > value of this, but it will clutter the history of my feature
>  > development. Is there any way of avoiding this? Would the loom
>  > extension help here?
>  >
>  > Does anyone have any suggestions as to how this workflow might be improved?
>
>  Probably by using rebase plugin after each merge from upstream.

It seems to me it would be nice for revisions to separated into the
following groups.

- merge revisions (and it would be nice if this were cleverly written
as two, one that contained all non-conflicting changes and a second
half that contained the merge operators corrections).
- final revisions (these can be pushed or pulled)
- open revisions (these can be rebased, squished, uncommitted etc)

Simple local flags on the revisions should be enough to provide this
(well obviously not the fancy merge split).  The distinctions would
help with scoping rebasing operations and avoid 'revisionist history'
from breaking content you've already pushed or people have pulled.

Have I been smoking something or can others see the value here too?

--
Talden