Re: what make-dist should include [was Re: Emacs pretest 26.1.91 is out]

[Stefan Monnier]

>> > With MQ the workflow is pretty simple:
>> >
>> >   1- unpack the tarball
>> >   2- create the repo and commit the unpacked files
>> >   3- pull the patches from their repo
>> >   4- apply the patches ("hg qpush -a")
>> >   5- build
>> 
>> [ The step 0 being "download the tarball".  ]
>> 
>> Hmm... ignoring the issue of Mercurial -vs- Git, the equivalent using
>> the VCS would be:
>> 
>>     0- clone from the remote repository to a local "bare" repository.
>>     1- clone from that local repository
>>     2- do nothing
>>     3- pull the patches from their repo
>>     4- apply the patches
>>     5- build
>
> Yeah, if all I were doing was applying static patches, there would be
> less benefit to using MQ.  But MQ helps with the tedium of managing a
> patch repo as I refine the patches.  (And I'm probably biased, since
> I've been using Mercurial for over 10 years, but I only started using
> Git when Emacs moved to it.)

Note that steps 3-5 are 100% unchanged.

> Sometime a few years ago I used a Mercurial extension to access a Git
> repo.  I had pretty much the same experience: it worked okay but was
> kinda slow.  I don't know if that extension is still available or
> maintained.

If the conversion to a different repository format is the problem, then
I guess passing through tar is not that bad of a deal, indeed (you can
get the same result by "git clone"ing and then committing the result to
an Hg repository, but the benefits are not as clear).


        Stefan