[Gnu-arch-users] Maintaining private changes with upstream tarball releases?

[Marius Kjeldahl]

After reading through Tom's tutorial, section "Elementary Branches -- 
Maintaining Private Changes", it is still not clear for me how to apply this 
into practice in one situation I am looking at.

In short, the software is released upstream as basic tarballs. The current 
version is 2.0.8. I have patches that contribute various things for the 
version I use. Some of my patches have already been accepted for future 
releases, but others may remain private for an unknown amount of time. They 
might still be interesting for other users, so I am planning to keep the 
patches available for each new release of the software.

So typically, I will do the following:

* Extract the tarball
* Apply my changes/contribution and keep the ability to release individual 
patches for the individual changes/contributions.

Any suggestions on how to organise these types of changes? Should I keep the 
"clean" 2.0.8 version in mainline and create a branch for each of my 
contributions (named "feature X", "feature Y" etc), or should I just create 
one branch (named "my stuff") and doing fancy tla commands to get a changeset 
for each feature (or possibly just say "it's all or nothing" to make it 
simple to maintain for me).

What is the best way of organising this? Should I just disregard the upstream 
version numbers and just import them in mainline--0.1 (typically), using 
"snapshot" type tagging for marking which revision in my mainline--0.1 
version corresponds to which upstream version? Is it ok to use the actual 
version names for the symbolic names (e.g. 2.0.8 etc..), or do I need to keep 
track of which snapshot release corresponds to what 2.0.8 etc?

But more importantly, how should I go about applying my patches when the next 
version of the software is released as an upstream tarball (e.g. 2.0.9)? 
Should I create a new version in mainline and put the 2.0.9 tarball there, 
and how do I go about applying just my patches from my "development" 
branch(es) from 2.0.8? Is it as simple as doing "replay" in the new 2.0.9 
version and fixing stuff manually if replay fails?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Marius Kjeldahl