The Future of Fedora Package Management and the RPM Philosophy

[Bojan Smojver]

Jeffrey C. Ollie <jeff <at> ocjtech.us> writes:

> What this
> discussion has been about is bringing patch development out of a hidden
> corner the package maintainer's laptop hard drive and into a centrally
> maintained, publicly available version control repository.

I thought that all patches already existed in CVS. What's hidden?

> Apparently you have never used a version control system that properly
> supports branching and merging.  CVS and Subversion do not count.  Git,
> Mercurial, and Bazaar are ones that do and make it easy (in some cases
> trivial) to maintain code/patches in branches and then rebase the
> patches to new versions of the upstream code as they are released.  With
> the proper discipline, keeping track of the changes that we have made to
> the pristine code isn't really a problem.

You are right, I didn't. I saw Linus talk about git and I kind of get the bit
about identifying what's what, but I'm still not sure how such a system knows
how to redo the patch so it applies to a completely new version of the software.
But maybe it does - I never used it, so I really don't know.

> However, I don't want this thread to descend into a debate about the
> best revision control system.  We need to be discussing things at a
> higher level right now.

No, that's OK. I think Fedora should switch version control software anyway. CVS
most definitely had its day.

--
Bojan