Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Using Arch to track non-Arch upstreams

[Jan Hudec]

On Thu, Aug 28, 2003 at 18:20:36 -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> One of the most common problems that I run into with tools like Arch,
> cvs, and subversion is tracking upstreams that have no public version
> tracking system or are using one that I'm not.  They usually
> distribute either diffs from one version to the next, or just put out
> tarballs of each version.
> 
> With some relatively stable projects, this is not terribly difficult
> with most version control systems, including Arch.
> 
> With some others, especially large ones, the task gets much more
> complicated.  Files and directories get added, deleted, renamed, and
> moved, and tracking changes across those actions can be difficult.
> 
> Subversion comes with a script called svn_load_dirs that I can use
> when importing new versions of such upstreams.  It will identify the
> additions, deletions, and renames and let me manually match up the old
> version with the new.  The tool stinks, but it's better than nothing.
> (It essentially runs "svn cp", "svn mv", etc. behind the scenes.)
> 
> Arch doesn't have such a tool.  Moreover, I'd think that putting
> taglines in the source file would be a recipe for disaster.  When a
> file moves and you're using diffs or tarballs from upstream, there is
> essentially a delete of the old file and an add of the new -- and that
> doesn't preserve local changes.
> 
> Does anyone have good suggestions for this problem?

The first approach - using explicit tags and changing the commands in
scn_load_dirs to their arch counterparts should not have any problems.
Except it will of course stink the way it does for svn.

Other way to go is using the names tagging method, which does not handle
renames (they end up as delete+add), but if you can live with that, it's
least work to use it.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                                                 Jan 'Bulb' Hudec 
<address@hidden>