keeping software forks under MacPorts repo?

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Sat, 9 Nov 2019 at 17:54, Ken Cunningham wrote:
>
> In #57751 Michael and I have been talking about how keeping up the patchset for qt4 would probably be easier with our own fork of it, with our patches added on.
>
> QT4 has a github repo here <https://github.com/qt/qt> and we could fork that to MacPorts repo, and add our patches on there. Then we could draw from that repo for builds instead of the way we do it now. We both think this would be easier.
>
> I see Haiku already does that exact thing for some of their ports.
>
> Hopefully leaving aside a discussion about older systems / lots of patches/ etc for the moment, is there any interest in having these occasional forks under MacPorts github repo?
>
> Otherwise either Michael or I can do it ourselves, but that might have access issues someday...
>
> On a similar note, we have a couple of ports in the same boat (llvm*, for example). In those, Jeremy has his own fork with our patches, and uses a script to generate the patchsets — but that’s tricky, because I can’t access his repo very easily, so my patches are “extras” to his…

As long as someone is responsible for the individual repositories, I
would personally support this idea. But we would probably want to
prefix the repository names (something like "fork_qt", "fork_llvm") to
clearly distinguish them from our main repositories. Is it possible to
set up a cron job to keep the upstream branches and tags fully up to
date (but without deleting our own branches, and ideally without
accumulating deleted upstream branches)?

Mojca