Thoughts on 3.0 (quilt) and VCS workflows

[Colin Watson]

On Wed, Mar 03, 2010 at 05:12:01PM +0000, James Westby wrote:
> On Tue, 2 Mar 2010 11:25:25 +0000, Colin Watson <cjwatson at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > I thought some people here might be interested in the bug I just filed
> > on dpkg-dev:
> > 
> >   http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=572204
> 
> Interesting, thanks.
> 
> It matches some of my impressions.
> 
> Do you know if your hack is required for the lp:ubuntu/* branches, where
> we store exactly what dpkg-source -x produces?
> 
> I assume this writes a .pc directory and so it would allow you
> manipulate the patches directly.

It shouldn't be required in that case.  The flip side of course is that
you'll probably end up with horrendous diffs to the .pc directory for
trivial operations.

> >  I realise the solution I propose isn't
> > optimal given further bzr development, but I think it's the cleanest
> > method that works right now even if the cost is losing bzr conflict
> > resolution (which is annoying, but I'd rather that than have to mangle
> > quilt patch files by hand or accidentally mis-refresh a quilt patch to
> > include the upstream diff or any of the other things that can go wrong
> > when you confuse quilt about its base file contents).  Thoughts?
> 
> It is probably the best way, you are right.
> 
> I would love to improve this situation, but it requires some rather
> large changes to bzr to be able to do this well.

My thoughts exactly.  We'll see where the dpkg-dev bug goes, as that
would at least improve the workflow a little, I think.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]