"Brent W. Baccala" <cos...@freesoft.org> writes: > My first question is for advice on managing my workflow. I'm using the > Debian hurd package, which adds patches on top of a snapshot taken from > savannah's git tree. I think I want to work on the Debian-ized code, since > that's what's installed on my system, but that leaves me without git. It's > just a snapshot, not an actual git repository. Any advice?
Here is what I did. It's cumbersome but at least it works. I have a "hurd-upstream" working tree with a repository that I cloned from the "git://git.sv.gnu.org/hurd/hurd.git". I applied the API-relevant Debian patches as separate commits, in the same order as in debian/patches/series: debian/patches/exec_filename_exec.patch debian/patches/exec_filename_fs.patch debian/patches/exec_filename_use.patch debian/patches/exec_filename_fix.patch I set an "in-debian" branch at that point, and then made my own commits on top of them in the "master" branch. I can then build Debian-compatible executables from these branches. I also have a "hurd-debian" working tree. I extracted that from the Debian source package, so that I got a .pc directory with the correct state information. I then added a .git directory cloned from "git://anonscm.debian.org/pkg-hurd/hurd.git", so that I can view the history and make local commits. When I want to make a private Debian package with my Hurd changes, I run "git format-patch -o DIRECTORY/hurd-debian/debian/patches/kon in-debian..master" in my "hurd-upstream" repository, add the names of the patch files to debian/patches/series, describe the changes in debian/changelog, and build it with dpkg-buildpackage. This gives me proper Debian source and binary packages. In debian/changelog, I use "local" as the distribution and append ".kon.1" or another number to the version. I keep my own patches in the debian/patches/kon directory so that I can easily delete them before generating new ones from my "hurd-upstream" repository. The commit messages in my "hurd-upstream" repository have DEP-3 (http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep3/) "Bug", "Bug-Debian", or "Forwarded" fields at the bottom if applicable. The "Subject" and "From" fields are generated by git format-patch. Those working trees and repositories are inside the virtual machine. I also have clones of those repositories in the host in case the file system in the VM gets corrupted, and off-site backups of both the qcow2 disk images and the host-side repositories. (I did not have backups of my Hurd activity between May and July, and lost my unpublished patches when the SSD failed.) I omit the build trees from backups though.
