Arrange How We'll Work Here and Collaborate With Upstream

[RandomDSdevel]

     I'm initially somewhat inclined to want to work off of upstream's latest stable released tag (by tracking a 'stable' branch like what I have set up locally) and rebase as needed, but we could also work off of 'master.' Regardless, we need to find some way to make it easy to stay abreast of upstream commits, or at least most of them and/or the ones we'd be interested in. I also want us to consider how we'd upstream commits if we decided to do so for any before fully upstreaming our work here.

[rw]

Short term, overriding pour_bottle? to always be false should be enough IMO.

Long term, their changes to building packages (no more options?!) for v2 might force us to diverge.

[RandomDSdevel]

@rw:

⋮

Long term, their changes to building packages (no more options?!) for v2 might force us to diverge.

     There would, at least initially, likely remain a non-trivial number of commits we could keep in common, however, and I'd want to make maintaining that brew code similarity tenable. We'd handle differences in formulae between upstream's and our copies in an organization fork of Homebrw/homebrew-core, anyway, and, per portage-brew/portage-brew-staging-and-evolution#8, that doesn't exist yet.

[RandomDSdevel]

     With respect to branch organization here in portage-brew/brew, here, tentatively, is what I have set up for now:

• 'upstream-master' tracks upstream's 'master.'
  • Our 'master' branch tracks 'upstream-master.'
• 'upstream-stable' tracks upstream's latest stable tagged release.
  • Our 'stable' branch tracks 'upstream-stable.' (Odds could be that this should track our 'master' branch…?)

I haven't quite hammered out whether our PRs should be against our 'master' or our 'stable' branch and would appreciate guidance on that.

[RandomDSdevel]

     An update: I've reorganized which branches have which others as upstreams. Here's the new tentative layout:

• 'upstream-master' tracks upstream's 'master.'
  • Our 'master' branch tracks 'upstream-master.'
    • Our 'stable' branch tracks our 'master' branch.
    • PRs are tentatively against our 'master' branch.
• 'upstream-stable' tracks upstream's latest stable tagged release.

Having our 'stable' branch track our 'master' branch instead of our 'upstream-stable' branch comes with a trade-off:

• It makes it easier to pull our downstream commits in from 'master,' but more difficult to otherwise keep based off of a stable upstream release.

  (Instead of only manually pulling the latest tag into 'upstream-stable' and then rebasing 'stable' on top of that, one instead has to manually pull the latest tag into 'upstream-stable' and separately rebase 'stable' on top of that same upstream tag.)

I'm uncertain how this interacts, if at all well, with pulling commits from our 'master' branch into our 'stable' branch. Maybe somebody can suggest a cleaner solution here… (We could also switch back to the previous strategy if that's better.)

[RandomDSdevel]

     Also, in case it wasn't clear, I want to have tooling and/or automation set up to ease maintaining whatever we settle on here.

[SMillerDev]

Long term, their changes to building packages (no more options?!) for v2 might force us to diverge.

Options aren't going away in brew, just in the core repo.

[sjackman]

I'm the lead of maintainer of Linuxbrew/brew, which has been a fork of Homebrew/brew for about five years. Each stable release of Homebrew, I merge the stable tag (say 1.9.3) into branch a branch named merge-1.9.3 on Linuxbrew/brew. I open a pull request from that branch. When it passes CI, I merge that pull request (using git checkout master && git merge --ff-only merge-1.9.3 && git push origin master and delete the branch merge-1.9.3). Developers and our CI will now be using that master branch. I leave it for about a day, to wait for bug reports. After about a day, I push the stable tag (1.9.3) and release it.

[RandomDSdevel]

@SMillerDev:

Options aren't going away in brew, just in the core repo.

     We know, but see portage-brew/portage-brew-staging-and-evolution#8 and #1.

[RandomDSdevel]

@sjackman:

     So you don't have any analog of our 'upstream-master' branch? You only keep track of stable upstream releases?

[sjackman]

Correct. We merge only stable upstream releases into our master branch.