Best way to incorporate external django app into a project and safely make local changes

Question

Hi,

I am working on an ecommerce site, based on django-lfs, and I am finding that I need to make a number of changes to the django-lfs core files... i.e. adding additional properties to models, updating views, adding url patterns etc. I started out placing django-lfs in my pythons site-packages path with the view that if i needed to make any changes to the code I would either re-define the url pattern (in the case where i needed to do something different in a view) or monkey patch code.

The thinking behind this was that i'd be able to keep the original django-lfs trunk clean and un-touched, allowing me to update it to the most recent version and then independently update / test the local overrides, subclassing and monkey patches written.

As you might have guessed, this is quickly becoming a bit of a nightmare to manage so i'm in desperate need of a cleaner and more stable solution.

The client project sits in a git repo and so i have been looking into submodules or subtree merging strategies... from everything i have read though, I am finding it difficult to find any definitive answers that are simple to understand (i'm relatively new to git).

In short, I need to be able to:

1) Include an external git repository into the main projects repo 2) Either make changes directly to the external repo (but have it push to the projects git repo and not to the external remote origin) OR create a local copy of the external repo and then periodically merge the external repo with the copied folder.

I have no idea how to achieve this though. to be clear, I would like to end up with the following folder structure:

• PROJECT_NAME
  • MEDIA
  • TRUNK
    • APPS
      • django-lfs
  • EXTERNAL-REPOS
    • django-lfs

The lfs app in the external-repos folder should be able to pull down updates from the official (external) django-lfs repository and i should be able to freely make changes to tehe lfs folder stored in the APPS folder.

What i'm looking for, if at all possible, is a set of git commands / instructions to achieve the above and that make use of the real-worls folders outlined above, rather than using foo and bar references.

I hold my fingers tightly crossed and hope that someone out there can offer some advice :)

Answer 1

My quick take on this: either fork the project on bitbucket or github (depending on your preference of hg vs. git) and make a branch for your changes.

This will make it easier to keep your branch and the official master in sync.

Then, assuming you use pip+virtualenv, add the pointer to your repo/branch in your pip requirements file.

Unfortunately LFS uses buildout, so not quite sure what the equivalent of python setup.py develop would be (i.e. to install the package in your virtualenv site-packages but with links back to your repo so you can make changes without having to constantly run setup.py).