--- Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU> wrote:
> On Mon, 2002-10-14 at 08:06, Neal D. Becker wrote:
> > Does (will) subversion support the concept of
> patchsets?
>
> I've always kind of wondered how package maintainers
> (dkpg, RPM, ports,
> pkgsrc, etc.) manage their patch sets. It doesn't
> seem like any
> revision control system is really geared for them.
> I know that pkgsrc
> maintainers simply check patches into CVS, but
> that's not really making
> the revision control system work for you.
>
> What you want for named patch sets doesn't really
> map to commits. As
> you said, one commit might affect multiple patch
> sets (although that's
> arguably a bad practice), and multiple commits may
> go into the making of
> a patch set. Complicating matters, patch sets may
> have dependencies on
> each other, but they usually don't, so you want a
> system which can
> handle dependencies but is optimistic enough to make
> the user's life
> easy in the normal case. The dependencies may form
> a dag which is not a
> tree, so you can't use a directory hierarchy to
> represent the general
> case of dependencies.
Right, I over-simplified things when I suggested using
task branches to isolate several commits related to
the same patch set.
Another issue is when patch sets have conflicts.
> I don't know of any revision control system which is
> geared towards
> patch sets, nor do I know of any methodology within
> any revision control
> system which makes their maintenance
> straightforward. You can use
> branches to help, but you'll wind up doing a lot of
> merging.
Perhaps setting properties may help in tracking
dependency issues? Of course, this would require
management that is outside the scope of the revision
control system.
Aside from keeping integration branches, I don't know
what can help with patch sets that have conflicts with
each other.
In the end, I think these issues really should be
addressed outside of the revision control system
proper since resolving the issues would probably mean
having to follow certain branching procedures. OTOH,
the revision control system should provide enough
features to be able to help track this info.
HTH,
Noel
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Received on Mon Oct 14 17:37:54 2002