Re: [Quilt-dev] [PATCH] quilt drop command

[Jean Delvare]

Hi Josh,

[Josh Boyer]
> (...)  So you could promote and demote the patches in any
> combination, as long as b is always applied before c.  Quilt doesn't
> have any way of know that today though, so it's left up to the user.

I think it does have a way to know, but to a limited extent. Quilt would
learn about dependencies between patches if asked to switch two patches
in the series file (either promote or demote, which are the very same
operation when you think of it) and the operation would fail. So,
although quilt cannot have an idea of the dependency before trying, the
failure would reveal the dependency, and quilt could then tell the user
about it. I don't think it is really different from e.g. push, which may
fail, and quilt has to try before it knows and tells the user. So I'm
not certain the patch grouping feature you mentioned would even be
needed for promote/demote to be implementable.

> This could be highly useful to people using a single tree for multiple
> patch sets that don't really have anything to do with each other.  For
> example, maintaining two separate driver trees.

I think some people do that already (Greg KH among others, and you know
he has a lot of stuff in his trees), and it works just fine. There is
probably no immediate need for patch grouping nor promote/demote (but we
can continue to think about it for the day we'll really need it, of
course).

Thanks,
-- 
Jean Delvare