#182 ch04: Rework vendor branch section. Entirely.

[Anonymous]

Originally created by: cmpilato
Originally owned by: cmpilato

The section on Vendor Branches in Chapter 4 is ... whack.  Confusing, verbose, and out of date.  It needs reworking.

Here's what I'm thinking:

   * Vendor Branches
      - Vendor Branches from Foreign Repositories
         o Discuss creating the branch via the new-in-1.8 "foreign repos
           copy", and maintain via "foreign repos merges".  Sidebar
           about painful rename tracking.  
      - Vendor Branches from Mirrored Sources
         o Creating the first mirrored source via 'import', successive
           one as branch+diff (maybe svn_load_dirs.pl gets revived).
           Maintain via "2-URL svn merge".  Reference rename hell
           sidebar.
      - Vendor Branches from Unversioned Sources
         o Discuss in general ways that this can be done, but point out
           that this is a book about version control, not about how to
           creatively wield GNU diff and patch.

This is a must-have for 1.8, if only because I just committed the complete upheaval of the original Vendor Branch section and I think it's worse than what was there before.  :-(

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: cmpilato

> Creating the first mirrored source via 'import', successive
> one as branch+diff (maybe svn_load_dirs.pl gets revived).

Need to explain this, if only so I remember.  Part of the issue with dealing with locally mirrored third-party sources is that simple imports aren't ancestrally connected and don't properly carry rename information.  So 'svn merge' across them needs --ignore-ancestry just to avoid treating the whole op as a massive delete + a massive add.  Better to import v1 of the vendor code, then create v2 as a branch + all the mods required to make v1 look like v2 (ideally preserving renames).  That would at least give svn merge a fighting chance today, and possibly a very real probability of success in the future.

[Anonymous]

Originally posted by: cmpilato

Finished in [r4361].
   Sending        book/ch04-branching-and-merging.xml
   Transmitting file data .
   Committed [r4361].

Status: Fixed