Re: [Gnu-arch-users] question about splitting categories

[Tom Lord]

    > From: address@hidden

    > Posit the following (purely hypothetical) scenario:

Wow, sounds like the beginning of a (vintage) Twilight Zone episode.

    > I've created the project 'hello-world--mainline--0.1', similar to that
    > described in the document "Arch meets hello-world".  In addition to
    > the GUI front-end, I've added networking and database capability, so
    > that the source tree now consists of a top-level "src" directory,
    > which in turn contains "gui", "net" and "db" subdirectories, each
    > containing a Makefile and various .c and .h files.

    > This goes along fine for a few months until, buoyed by the huge
    > commercial success of the "hello-world" application, I start work on a
    > new application, call it "goodbye-world".  So I create
    > 'goodbye-world--mainline--0.1", and off I go.

    > However, I soon discover that the "net" and "db" sources in
    > "hello-world" are exactly what I want for "goodbye-world", and in
    > fact, they probably should be spun off into their own libraries,
    > meaning two more categories: "world-net-lib" and "world-db-lib".  Is
    > there a way to do this cleanly in Arch while (hopefully) preserving
    > revision histories and not breaking all developers' source trees?


Been there, done that.   Here's what I did:


(a) form branched versions of hello-world for each subdir that you
    want to factor out

(b) make a "top level" project for your config files

(c) edit down each fork to just the parts its supposed to contain


That's it.   Works just fine.

If you wind up having to do "late" merges back from the unfactored
source into one of your new sub-projects, you might wind up with 
dopatch setting aside some patches in a subdir called
"++patches-missing-files" -- which you can glance over to make sure
you didn't miss anything important and then delete.

-t