Proceedure for package private branches for testing

[Ian Kent]

On Sun, 2008-01-06 at 13:09 +0100, Till Maas wrote:
> On Sun January 6 2008, Ian Kent wrote:
> 
> > Sometimes when trying to solve a problem I need to add a patch to a
> > package, say kernel, and do a build (probably a scratch build) to test
> > and possibly have the reporter use it for testing as well.
> >
> > So can someone tell me what the proper procedure is for creating a
> > private branch for a package in Fedora?
> 
> The easiest way I know, is to check out the branch you want to modify in a 
> separate directory, patch, run "make srpm" and make a scratch build 
> with "koji build --scratch dist-f9 *.src.rpm".

Yes, I got this advice on IRC and managed to get a build.

It's really cumbersome though.

Is it a problem to allow commits for specific named branches like
private-.....-branch and ignore them for composition purposes?

> 
> For patching I begin to use
> - make prep
> - then go into the source directory
> - run a cp -a file $file.$description on files I want to patch
> - then edit $file
> - go back to the directory where the spec is in
> - run make patch SUFFIX=$description (or maybe mae patch SUFFIX=.$description)
> - add the patch to the spec with %patchXX -b .$description

Thanks for the advice.
I'm fine with the patching thing but I haven't used "make patch" before
(or make rediff for that matter), interesting.

Ian