Re: [Quilt-dev] Extending on the grouping feature - recursive series

[Tom Rini]

On Mon, Jul 11, 2005 at 09:26:39AM +0200, Sébastien Dugué wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-07-08 at 07:46 -0700, Tom Rini wrote:
> > On Fri, Jul 08, 2005 at 03:59:18PM +0200, Andreas Gruenbacher wrote:
[snip]
> > > I'm not sure this feature is generally useful. It would slow down quilt 
> > > as a 
> > > whole. Another issue is how to walk the tree (moving forward and 
> > > backward), 
> > > and into which series file to insert new patches. Do you have a case 
> > > where 
> 
>   Right, adding a new patch would be ambigous as to where to insert it.
> 
> > > creating one single series file really causes a significant amount of 
> > > work? 
> 
>   None really, it's not about the amount of work but rather about 
> maintainability. The thing is that when having a lot of patches I find 
> it would be easier to maintain if the series file could be broken down 
> into several sets of patches. But then it will surely break existing
> quilt commands semantic. 
> 
> > > Patches usually don't combine in arbitrary orders anyway, so the 
> > > different 
> > > parts of the series file need to be put together very carefully anyway...
> 
>   Right again.
> 
> > 
> > We've been talking about doing something like this for a different
> > reason.  Rather than looking for $SERIES in a subdir, we've been talking
> > about some sort of include mechanism so that we can have something like:
> > series.released # Released product.
> > series.next # Development of next product, 'include's series.released
> > series.dev_board_a # Development on board a, 'include's series.next
> > 
> > And so on.
> > 
> 
>   That could be a solution, but it would raise the same problem
> described by Andreas as to where to insert any new patch.

The same day I wrote this, a coworker came up with a partial fix, for our
needs at least.  The problem of "where does a new patch go?" is much
simpiler as any included file is frozen, so we wouldn't want a patch going
in there.  But right now it only lets you modify the parsed series,
which isn't completely useful.

-- 
Tom