Git tools for managing patchsets

[Daniel J. Luke]

On Oct 24, 2016, at 1:39 PM, Clemens Lang <cal at macports.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 10:29:19AM -0700, Michael wrote:
>> My understanding -- and maybe this is my error here -- is that your
>> patches have to be constantly rebased onto the current version every
>> time the upstream releases a new version.
> 
> I think our understanding of what "upstream" is in this sentence
> differs. We are *not* talking about patches to be applied to packaged
> software, we are talking about changes to the port definitions, i.e. the
> Portfiles themselves. "Upstream" in this case means the master branch of
> github.com/macports/macports-ports, as opposed to a branch in a fork of
> your own that you may be using to prepare changes for a pull request.

I think Michael is thinking:

I have port 'foo' in macports and it requires a (rather large/complicated) patch that currently sits in files/ and has to be re-generated every time upstream releases a new version of 'foo'

And essentially we're saying "we haven't done anything to make that easier" (Macports repo move doesn't change how you are dealing with this now).

While this should be a minority of ports (and all port maintainers should work to get their patches incorporated upstream whenever possible), it would be worthwhile in looking at things to make handling this situation easier (especially if similar projects already have tools to deal with it). It's also perfectly reasonable to punt on this until after we've settled in after the repo move.

-- 
Daniel J. Luke