Managing modifications to an open source product

I develop for a site that uses Mediawiki (MW). We make some modifications to it before deployment. Generally, (using subversion) we check out a tagged version into a workspace, recursively delete the .svn directories, modify a small number of files, add some of our own extensions, and then commit the result into our own repository. We then work with the source from there.

This approach means we have to track MW bug-fixes and add them to our modified version. I was wondering if there is a better way to accomplish the same objective. For example, we can use the svn:externals property to point to the MW repository version of the extensions we use, so each time they are updated, all we need to do is svn up on the externals directory.

The main source is a different story. Since we modify some of the files (and have no commit privileges to the MW repository), the files we modify are not within our purview to change (and understandably the MW people wouldn't allow it even if we had commit privileges).

Is there any way to use the svn:externals property to solve the main source issue? For example, could we point the revision we keep in our main repository to the correct revision in the MW repository and then tag the appropriate directories that contain the files we modify with svn:external. These latter svn:external properties would name the individual files we modify and point to the modified version that we could keep in our repository. My concern is we are "overloading" the files in the MW repository with files in our repository and I am not sure subversion allows that.

Regards,

Dan Nessett

      
Received on 2010-10-14 21:29:24 CEST