svn or arch

[Colin Walters]

On Fri, 2004-12-17 at 13:30 -0800, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Hi
> > Yes; but you still have the rpm revision number.  I
> > am arguing for its
> > removal entirely.  That's one less spurious thing
> > you see in a diff
> > between branches, and one less thing to merge
> > conflict on.
> 
> 
> can such things be done without breaking compatibility ?

In short, yes.  

I see no serious problems with taking a snapshot of the source tree and
generating a compatible SRPM.  It's trivial to regenerate the Release:
and Version: headers from the package build database.  The changelog can
be generated from the RCS history.

Keeping compatibility with PatchN: is a bit harder since with a modern
RCS, you can e.g. add a binary file in a branch.  But if you limit your
branches to what can be expressed by diff, then you just do a checkout
of the patch-branch, do a diff, and stick in a PatchN line.

One thing that should be clear is that by using a revision control
system for RPM packaging, we've already conceptually broken
compatibility because the SRPM is no longer the preferred form of
modification, to use the GPL terminology.