Re: git: "overlay" of own remote-branch on official freebsd-ports repo

On Tue, Oct 12, 2021 at 9:32 AM FreeBSD User <freebsd@walstatt-de.de> wrote:

> I do not know whether I'm right in this list, but since the subject is
> mutual so common
> in development and GIT, I have the strong feeling I'm right here.
>
> Im quite new to git, so apologizes for any inconvenience reading my
> question.
>
> Using poudriere on 14-CURRENT to create a selection of packages also
> includes updating
> the ports tree on a regular basis. I maintain some "special" ports not
> official part of
> the FreeBSD ports tree and some other ports are part of those I'm supposed
> to maintain. I
> keep personally track of the changes in a git repo of my own.
>
> Now I'd like to "overlay" the official portas repo by that of mine to
> include changes.
> With SVN, there was no problem to have local changes not overwritten by
> regular updates
> of the ports tree as long as the specific port in question wasn't updated
> by the official
> site. In git, this behaviour seems to have changed, any changes I made so
> far are gone
> after poudriere is adviced to update the tree.
>
> I'd like to ask how FreeBSD developers and maintainers do the trick. If
> there is an
> official cookbook fpr maintainers (I haven't found it yet ...), please be
> so kind and
> refer to it. Any advice is welcome.
>

tl;dr: branches are cheap and well supported in git. You just make a branch
for your
local changes, and update that however you see fit.

For ports I have like that, I've just created a branch in git. I rebase the
branch forward
each time I update. For me, though, the branch is mostly uncommitted in
upstream
changes that may not be ready for some reason... There's two ways to do
this.
You can just merge, which is OK if you aren't upstreaming the changes, or
you can
rebase if the changes or a subset of the changes likely will end up in
FreeBSD.

Others might recommend stash, but I find it too unwieldy for more than a
couple
of things.

So the workflow would be:

git clone -o freebsd <freebsd-ports-repo-of-choice> freebsd-ports
cd freebsd-ports
git checkout -b hartmann-specials
<copy over your special ports or changes to ports and commit them>

Now, you can use poudriere-ports with the -B hartmann-specials and your
local repo as the source of truth.

to update

cd freebsd-ports
git checkout main
git pull --rebase                              # or --ff-only, I use
--rebase because I push and it's habit
git rebase -i main hartmann-specials

Note: if you need to have multiple trees with this branch you are modifying,
then a git pull --rebase will let you cope with the forced-pushes this
method
would require. You can also do it with git merge on hartmann-specials if you
don't need to keep the changes separate or you have a lot of downstreams
that would get cranky, which doesn't sound like the case here.

Warner