Hi, I'm trying to find a way to deploy software with custom patches in production. The base software is opensource with their own repos (SVN) and we've got some patches to select only for one service and not the other (so we've got base+patchA+patchB on one server and base+patchA+patchC on another).
Everything will be deployed as packages, which is pretty simple. The issue I'm thinking about is: how do we store the modifications? These are some ways I thought about:
- I've tried using quilt / patch series + downloading a specific revision from upstream when building. This works well, until we need to port patches to a new version. Since quilt needs a copy of the tree for patch modifications, it takes a really long time to fix stuff. Also, having different versions deployed on different servers means we need to have different build-scripts.
- I could clone the repository into local git/hg and create a branch with local modifications. That's great for porting patches forwards and I can make local release tags on my branch, but unfortunately I lose the information about separate patches. I can see the diff to upstream of course, but I lose the clear separation of different local modifications.
- I tried stacked git / hg-mq, but as far as I can see, they don't export the patch series easily. They're good for storing work in progress. I can do the same trick that BitBucket does and create patch queues "inside the repository" to export them, but then every patch queue would be assigned to a branch separately (same modification would be needed in every local branch that uses
patchAfor example).
Do you have any other ideas, articles, standardised ways of doing this? Additional pros & cons for the ways I mentioned?